The health care heroes behind Bioscience Connecticut’s success

At the very heart of the hundreds of millions of dollars in Bioscience Connecticut investments is UConn Health.

And this hefty investment is not just for bricks and mortar for a state-of-the-art, futuristic hospital tower, outpatient pavilion, classrooms or research laboratories.

It is a true investment in people, the health care heroes and interdisciplinary teams who work day-in and day-out inside our state’s cutting-edge and high-tech medical spaces, caring for us at our time of need, training our future doctors, and creating the research breakthroughs in advancing medicine here and around the globe – while boosting the economy.

Our strides for example in just the cardiovascular medicine world alone is evidence of the success of Bioscience CT’s impact in fueling the daily battle against the number one killer of Americans – heart disease.

The recruitment thanks to Bioscience CT of innovator Dr. J. Travis Hinson, a joint faculty member at UConn Health and the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine in Farmington, is powering the new frontier of cardiovascular genetic testing and research breakthroughs. Hinson’s work is arming patients and their families with knowledge of their risks and why heart disease runs rampant in their family members generation after generation. Through a simple blood draw Hinson, a cardiologist and a scientist, can now engineer miniature beating human heart tissue from a patient’s own blood stem cells. His laboratory work can reveal gene mutations for life-threatening cardiomyopathy or heart failure to allow for earlier clinical interventions to safeguard patients from any symptoms or cardiac events before they ever strike.

Yet another team of medical scientists from my own laboratory and National Institutes of Health are developing a new medication to treat patients with advanced heart failure, again thanks to Connecticut’s investment.

Dr. Annabelle Rodriguez Oquendo, the Roth Chair of Cardiovascular Research in the Center for Vascular Biology, is not only a physician-scientist but an inventor and entrepreneur. Thanks to support of Bioscience CT her biotech start-up company Lipid Genomics joined UConn’s Technology Incubation Program to advance personalized medicine for those who have good levels of healthy HDL cholesterol but are still genetically at risk for heart disease and heart attacks.

In fact, should her novel blood test that can predict heart disease and other chronic inflammatory diseases such as cancer become widely commercialized, not only will patients reap the clinical benefits but in turn Connecticut will economically benefit from its investments.

Realizing the promise of excellence in clinical care through Bioscience CT, UConn Health’s multidisciplinary medical teams are leading the way forward in better tackling the daily ravages of heart attacks by extending UConn John Dempsey Hospital’s reach into a patient’s home to improve their survival and outcomes.

During the Feb. 9 blizzard Jean-Guy Boucher, 76 of Bristol, was snow blowing his property when severe chest pain suddenly struck him. Within minutes paramedics responded performing a 12-lead electrocardiogram to confirm his suspected heart attack. Just like 120 times annually, emergency responders immediately radioed in an early notification alert to activate UConn’s Cardiac Interventional Catheterization Laboratory. Once Boucher got to UConn the cardiology team was waiting at the door and within merely 28 minutes unclogged his blocked artery and halted his heart attack.

In recent years, UConn’s average hospital door-to-balloon care time for patient’s like Boucher was between 37.5 minutes and 56 minutes, significantly below the national guideline of 90 minutes or less. With one of the best track records in the state, UConn is Connecticut’s only hospital to win the AHA’s Mission Lifeline EMS Gold Award two years in a row.

But it takes a lot of investment in people, their companies and their teams to keep our state’s citizens healthy with access to the latest medical discoveries.

Thank you to our very own health care heroes across UConn Health’s clinical and medical science specialties. Keep up the good work and your fight against diseases.