Professor Dr Philippe Menasché is a clinical cardiac surgeon at the Hôpital Européen

Georges Pompidou, Professor of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery at the University of Paris and

Co leader of an INSERM (National Institute of Health and Medical Research) team devoted to

cell therapy of cardiovascular diseases. He also has a part time affiliation with the

Department of Biomedical Engineering of the University of Alabama in Birmingham. The

group has a long standing interest in stem cells for the treatment of heart failure. While the

initial research has focused on the transplantation of skeletal myoblasts, it then moved

towards the combination of cardiac progenitors derived from human embryonic stem cells

(ESC) with a tissue engineering based construct. The first in man trial testing this cell loaded

patch has now been successfully completed. In parallel, mechanistic studies have unraveled

the predominant role of paracrine signaling and, consequently, the group is now shifting its

research towards a cellular cell therapy based on the exclusive use of the secretome with

the objective of further streamlining the clinical translatability of this myocardial repair

strategy. However, considering that cell therapy is an area where different medical areas can

cross fertilize in a particularly fruitful fashion, we have now leveraged our experience with

heart failure to other non cardiac indications including severe traumatic brain injury, acute

respiratory distress syndromes as seen in patients with Covid 19 induced pneumonia and

possibly in the future other neurological diseases involving a strong inflammatory

component.