CL grad’s work may fix hearts
By SARAH SUTSCHEK - ssutschek@nwherald.com
In the late 1980s, all the scientists were doing it, Linda Shapiro said.
So she cloned a molecule, and she has spent the past 20 years researching it.
Fifty-two-year-old Shapiro is a 1975 Crystal Lake High School graduate, now an associate professor of cell biology at the University of Connecticut Health Center.
“I knew I liked science because my dad was one of the early doctors in Crystal Lake,” she said. “He loved his patients and worked very hard, but I liked to figure things I out. I liked to solve the problems.”
Shapiro is working with CD13, performing research she hopes will help people make quicker recoveries from heart attacks.
When a person has a heart attack, the body sends stem cells to the site of the injury to help heal. Shapiro is studying how the signals that send those cells in get turned on.
“That is a big injury when you have a heart attack,” she said. “A lot of cells have to be called to the place where the heart attack is. We thought we could exploit the signals and get some extra repair cells by injecting them and making them go to the heart attack.”
Shapiro said the idea is to inject the cells into the bloodstream, but getting the cells to the right place is a challenge.
“The hardest part of stem cells is trying to make them do what you want to do,” Shapiro said. “It’s kind of a tricky process.”
By injecting more cells, the goal is to reduce the amount of scar tissue that forms after a heart attack.
“You don’t get a hole, but it’s not always functioning right. It doesn’t beat like it’s supposed to. We’d like to get more beating cells than scar tissue,” she said.
Aside from working on what she hopes will be a major medical advance, Shapiro said she enjoys spending time with her husband and three children, Hannah, 22; Abby, 19; and Sam, 16.
“I hope it works, but we’re scientists, we don’t like attention,” Shapiro said. “For me, personally, it’s nice; it’s exciting. I think it’s a very promising project, so it would be great if it would work and I could actually help somebody.”
She also teaches classes at the medical school.
“The most rewarding part of this whole thing is teaching students because they may be the ones who win the Nobel Prize,” she said.
