The best medicine for a broken heart, it turns out, might not be time or chocolate or revenge, but a peptide with the unlikely name QHREDGS

Professor Milica Radisic (IBBME/ChemE) is a leader in cardiovascular tissue engineering, the science of building living tissues using cells and biomaterials. She grows heart cells in her lab and then engineers them into heart tissues that beat.

But she — and other tissue engineers — consistently run into trouble when they try to build bigger tissues like hearts.

“One of the key problems with tissue engineering,” she said, “is cell death. Cells die, partly because our cultivation systems are not as perfect as our bodies.” Enter QHREDGS, a peptide that is a small molecule made up of amino acids, which occur naturally in our bodies.

Radisic and collaborators discovered that this particular peptide prevented cell death in two types of cells — cardiomyocytes, which are beating heart cells, and endothelial cells, which line our blood vessels.

She has been awarded the Connaught Fund Innovation Award, which she will use to support the research team’s theory.