New Leaders in Cardiovascular Science

As a boy in suburban Los Angeles, Mark Sussman’s mother used to tell him that scientists saved more lives than physi-cians because they were the ones who developed the treatments that doctors used. He has taken her words to heart. By deploying a wide range of tools gathered throughout a diverse 25-year career, Sussman is pursuing novel ways to encourage the replacement and repair of damaged tissue in heart failure, the leading cause of hospitalization in the elderly. After a postdoctoral fellowship in cytoskeletal biology, Sussman joined the molecular genetics laboratory of Larry Kedes, at the University of Southern California. There, he characterized the role of the tropomodulin, a protein that caps and regulates the length of actin fibers, in the heart.1 In his first faculty position, at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, he created a transgenic mouse model of dilated cardiomyopa-thy resulting from the cardiac-specific overexpression of tropomodulin.2 Sussman’s research in the area of signaling networks in the heart led to the discovery of the role of Pim-1 ki-nase as a mediator of cardiomyocyte survival and proliferation.3 Using cells from patients with severe heart failure undergoing left ventricular assist devic