Medical Advisory Council: Leaders in Stem Cell Therapy

The Okyanos Heart Institute Medical Advisory Council provides extensive insight on cell biology and the mechanisms of action that these cells have on improving heart function and repairing damage to the heart muscle as a result of a heart attack.

Eric Duckers, MD, PhD, FESC, FACC

Dr. Duckers serves as an interventional cardiologist and the head of the Molecular Cardiology Laboratory at the Thoraxcenter, Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He is the principal investigator of the ADVANCE clinical trial, which treats patients within 24 hours of an acute heart attack using cells from a person’s own fat tissue, known as adipose-derived stem and regenerative cells. Previously, Dr. Duckers served as an investigator for the PRECISE clinical trial, which treated patients with chronic coronary artery disease who had exhausted all options from conventional treatment and upon which the Okyanos Heart Institute cardiac cell therapy treatment is based.

Farrell Mendelsohn, MD, FACC

Dr. Mendelsohn serves as the director of the Center for Therapeutic Angiogenesis. A graduate of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Dr. Mendelsohn completed his internship and residency in internal medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was a clinical fellow in medicine at Harvard Medical School. He completed a fellowship at Duke University Medical Center in cardiovascular disease where he began his research on therapeutic angiogenesis. In 1999 he founded the Center for Therapeutic Angiogenesis in Birmingham, Ala. and through the center has served as the principal investigator in more than 20 clinical trials of therapeutic angiogenesis for both coronary artery and peripheral artery disease patients using various protein, gene and stem cell therapies. Dr. Mendelsohn dosed the first patient in the world with the vascular growth factor HGF using a percutaneous intra-myocardial delivery catheter and performed the first stem cell transplant to the heart in Alabama.

Leslie Miller, MD, FACC

Dr. Miller, chairman of the department of cardiovascular medicine at the University of South Florida (USF) and director/CEO of the USF Cardiovascular Clinical and Research Integrated Strategic Program, is a renowned cardiologist, specifically in the areas of heart failure and transplant. Dr. Miller previously served as the director of the cardiac programs at Georgetown University School of Medicine, Georgetown University Hospital and Washington Hospital Center. Prior to that, he was a professor and director of the cardiovascular division at the University of Minnesota. Over the course of his medical career, Dr. Miller has served as an investigator in more than 80 clinical trials, and one of his research foci has been the use of adipose-derived stem and regenerative cells for the treatment of cardiovascular disease.