Stem Cells and the Future of Heart Care - Medicine Informing Novel Discoveries (MIND)

All right, thanks, Kat, and thank you for putting this together.

It's a privilege to be in front of all of you.

I'm Shami Mahmood.

I'm the Division Chief of Cardiovascular Medicine at UC San Diego and also the Executive Director of the Cardiovascular Institute.

So I'm going to take off my interventional cardiology hat for today, though I'll touch upon it just a little bit, and take a little broader hat of what we have experienced tried and I think successfully established at UC San Diego with our cardiovascular institute.

It's a unique institute established in 2018, and the idea was that we have a multidisciplinary institute that takes care of patients who have cardiovascular disease, is involved in training and educating the next generation of physicians in cardiovascular medicine and surgery, and is involved in trials and studies, both basic science and clinical cardiovascular trials for improving healthcare as it relates to cardiology and cardiothoracic surgery.

And I'm very pleased to share that we are now ranked number one in San Diego, number three in California, and number 15 in the United States for cardiology and cardiovascular surgery.

I'll tell you a funny anecdote.

So when I started in this job, it's been now 15 years, and we had never been ranked nationally in cardiology and cardiac surgery.

And I was told, well, you'll never be able to compete with Scripps.

This is 15 years ago.

The first time we were ranked, so our cardiovascular center at UCSD opened in 2011.

We were ranked number 42 in 2012.

And now, as I mentioned, we're number 15.

And this is a few years ago, we were number 20 something.

And I came home and I was really pleased that, you know, we've moved from the 40s to the 20s.

And my boys at the time in middle school, they said, dad, who's like, who cares if you're 20 something?

Well, what are you proud of about that?

Nobody talks about being number 20 something.

It's like, all right, it's always nice to have your kids who set you straight.

And of course, our goal, that's not where we want to stop.

So we were established in 2018.

What's unique? And now both Michael Madani and myself have actually become sort of the go-to people to figure out how this is set up.

Because in most institutions in the United States, cardiology and cardiac surgery are for one, are not combined in a single entity.

Secondly, their function within their typical departments of medicine and surgery, and they don't get to make autonomous decisions.