Dr. Cristina Sanina is a senior cardiology fellow at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine-Montefiore Medical Center.  Her extraordinary ability is a rare combination of expertise in the field of Cardiovascular Disease, Translational Cardiac Stem Cells and Clinical Medicine. A brief perusal of her curriculum vitae will give one a sense of her outstanding success. She has authored or co-authored numerous original manuscripts and two important editorials which have been published in elite peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC), Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA), JACC Cardiovascular Interventions, Circulation Research, among others, the product of which has led to over 350 citations.  

 

She is also a co-author of seven textbook chapters, and is the editor of three published text books including Cardiac Regeneration: Principles and Practice (lead editor), Endovascular Interventions (co-editor), and Endovascular Interventions: Step by Step Approach (co-editor).  The product of Dr. Sanina’s research has also served as a building block for ongoing research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).  Her  pioneering research described for the first time in the literature that, when mesenchymal stem cells and cardiac stem cells are administered in concert, they restore cardiac function following injury more effectively than the administration of  mesenchymal stem cells  or cardiac stem cells injected independently.  Dr. Sanina is credited with discovering that the protein Connexin 43, is integral to cardiac regeneration. More specifically, she found that Connexin 43 determines whether a mesenchymal stem cell can differentiate into adult cardiac cells paving a clear path to development of viable cardiac regeneration therapeutics.  

 

She was also the first to indicate that injecting cardiac stems directly into damaged heart muscle not only has significant reparative value at the site of injection, but also has minimal reparative value distant from the stem cell injection site.  These contributions can lead to improving quality of life and decreasing mortality among millions of Americans who suffer from Heart Failure.  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 5.7 million adults in the United States have heart failure.  About half of the people who suffer from this condition die within 5 years of diagnosis and cost the nation over $30.7 billion each year.

 

In May 2019 she was awarded with the Leo M. Davidson Society of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine Outstanding Teaching Award.  In 2022, she will be continuing an Interventional Cardiology fellowship at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center-Harvard Medical School.