Sarkawt Hamad, a Kurdish regenerative medicine scientist and researcher, began his academic studies in biology. He did a Master’s degree at Salahaddin University in Erbil and pursued his doctorate at the University of Cologne in Germany, studying human stem cells and cardiovascular development.
“We will engineer the tissues in the human heart and we will use it later in our scientific research in a laboratory,” Hamad told Rudaw’s Znar Shino.
His research has many benefits. “These cells can be used in pharmacological drug validation for the pharmaceutical companies to use on humans directly instead of using it on animals,” he explained.
Hamad works closely with Professor Kurt Pfannkuche, a professor at the University of Cologne, concentrating on cardiac tissue engineering and human cardiac organoids at the Marga and Walter Boll Laboratory for Cardiac Tissue Engineering that opened in June 2023 under the supervision of Pfannkuche, with the help of the Marga and Walter Boll Foundation, located at the Center for Physiology and Pathophysiology of the Medical Faculty of the University of Cologne.
“Of course, what we are doing has been done for many years and many scientists attempted the same process, but we are working to develop the idea that can lead to a therapeutic product," said Pfannkuche.
“We have done initial efforts on animals to see if our tissue can be transplanted after a heart attack, but again many more research steps are needed to create effective cardiac tissues,” he added.