ChemRegen Awarded Small Business Grant Award from the National Institutes of Health.

San Diego, Calif. (July 3, 2011) - Scientists from ChemRegen, Inc. were awarded a Phase I STTR grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to use chemical biology to develop small molecule “toolbox” compounds that will stimulate stem cell differentiation and produce human cardiomyocytes. Ultimately, the results from this work will provide toolbox reagents for use to grow cardiomyocytes for use in a biotechnology process to treat heart disease and to improve the safety of human drugs in development. In the future, human stem cell therapy will provide a way to regenerate damaged heart muscle cells for heart attack victims. Current therapies only improve heart function and what is needed is the generation of new heart muscle cells.