Mark Sussman: programming heart cells to heal.

Abstract

As a boy in suburban Los Angeles, Mark Sussman’s mother used to tell him that scientists saved more lives than physicians because they were the ones who developed the treatments that doctors used. He has taken her words to heart. By deploying a wide range of tools gathered throughout a diverse 25-year career, Sussman is pursuing novel ways to encourage the replacement and repair of damaged tissue in heart failure, the leading cause of hospitalization in the elderly. After a postdoctoral fellowship in cytoskeletal biology, Sussman joined the molecular genetics laboratory of Larry Kedes, at the University of Southern California. There, he characterized the role of the tropomodulin, a protein that caps and regulates the length of actin fibers, in the heart.1 In his first faculty position, at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, he created a transgenic mouse model of dilated cardiomyopathy resulting from the cardiac-specific overexpression of tropomodulin.2 Sussman’s research in the area of signaling networks in the heart led to the discovery of the role of Pim-1 kinase as a mediator of cardiomyocyte survival and proliferation.3 Using cells from patients with severe heart failure undergoing left ventricular assist device implantation, Sussman’s laboratory at the San Diego State University Heart Research Institute recently demonstrated that stem cells engineered with Pim-1 kinase can enhance the repair of damaged myocardium.4 In a recent interview with Circulation Research , Sussman described how a successful career can be like a pinball machine: you ricochet from one thing to another, accumulating skills and ideas, and by making the most of each opportunity, end up doing something valuable that you never anticipated. Mark Sussman My father was an accountant who had little interest in science. On the contrary, my mother almost died of polio as a teenager and she always …