>> Hi. I'm Steve Houser.
I'm currently the Senior Associate Dean for Research at the Lewis Katz School
of Medicine at Temple University.
And I also serve as the director of our cardiovascular research center.
So in my laboratory, we're studying ischemic heart disease, in particular we're trying
to develop new therapeutics for patients who have suffered a heart attack.
In the remainder of my job, I'm an administrator where I manage the research mission
of the school of medicine developing new areas for research and helping faculty be successful.
So standard of care for those types of patients is to get them to the hospital as quickly
as you can, open up the blocked blood vessel,
stabilize them as best you can, then send them home.
And that's good and that has helped save lives, but the downside of that is that there is a big,
dead portion of the heart after the portion of the heart
that doesn't get any blood flow has reestablished flow.
So what we're trying to do is develop therapies that can grow new heart muscle
within the dead regions of the heart
so that we're literally curing the ischemic disease rather
than just treating the symptoms afterwards, which is what we currently do.