|  Nanette
H. Bishopric, MD, FACC
Professor of Pharmacology,
Medicine, and Pediatrics
Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami
Miami, Florida
1985–86 ACCF/Merck Fellow
“If I hadn’t gotten the ACCF/Merck
grant, my life would have taken a very different course. That
award did far more than encourage me to pursue a career in
science. It made it happen.”
– Dr. Bishopric
Her cardiology training nearly completed, Dr.
Nanette Bishopric had come to a fork in the road. All the
signs were pushing her, quite forcefully, toward the route
labeled practice. The slot reserved for her in a research
lab as well as her mentor had abruptly become unavailable,
and she had suddenly become the sole parent raising her infant
son. Then, just as she was about to abandon her plans for
a career in research, she received word that she had been
selected for an ACCF/Merck Award. She was back on the road
toward the career she had hoped for.
“I would not have become a scientist
if I hadn’t gotten this award,” she says. “Practical
decisions would have forced me into practice.”
Instead, she was in a position to set up shop
in the lab of Dr. Charles Ordahl at the University of California
at San Francisco. Using funds from her ACCF/Merck Award, she
bought “lots and lots of mice and rats, cell-culture
equipment, serum, antibiotics for my cell cultures”
and all the other tools she needed to launch her career as
a scientist.
Now a Professor of Pharmacology, Medicine,
and Pediatrics at the Miller School of Medicine at the University
of Miami, she artfully juggles a full load: 20 percent patient
care, “a lot of teaching,” and a very busy lab.
Her heart, at least professionally (she has three teenage
children who lay claim to her affections, too), is in her
lab, as it has been since she was a Merck Fellow of the College.
Today, she is gratified to see her work making
its way from bench to bedside. “Our work has led to
a discovery that the myocardium really is terribly plastic
and that it responds to growth by a wound-healing, cell cycle–reentry
type of response that can be treated in a similar way in some
regards,” she explains. And, she adds, the clinical
application of her work to treating heart failure, the most
prevalent morbid condition in the United States, is proof-positive
that the ACCF/Merck Award has had an impact on patient care.
A Few Firsts From Dr. Bishopric:
First paper describing transcriptional activation of proto-oncogenes
in the heart by growth factors
First cell culture model of gene reprogramming during cardiac
hypertrophy.
First cell culture model of ischemic preconditioning
First demonstration that proto-oncogene activation is responsible
for hypertrophic gene induction
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