Speaker Profile
Emerson C. Perin

Emerson C. Perin MD, PhD, FACC

Internal Medicine, Cardiology, Cardiovascular Disease
Houston, Texas, United States of America

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Dr. Emerson Perin, MD, Ph.D. is a Medical Director at Texas Heart Institute. He is a world-renowned cardiologist known for his leadership in the development of stem cell therapies for cardiovascular diseases. In 2008, he assumed a leadership role as Director of Research in Cardiovascular Medicine at THI. As a pioneer in clinical regenerative medicine, Dr. Perin performed the first stem cell injection in a patient with heart failure in 2001 and subsequently published the first clinical trial to evaluate stem cell therapy in heart failure patients.

As the founding Medical Director of the Stem Cell Center at THI in 1998, he has led multiple clinical trials of stem cell therapy, focusing on the treatment of heart failure, acute myocardial infarction, refractory angina, and peripheral arterial disease. Under his leadership, THI’s Stem Cell Center has become recognized as a worldwide leader in clinical research in stem cell therapy. Moreover, Dr. Perin serves as a founding member and Principal Investigator in the NHLBI Cardiovascular Cell Therapy Research Network, which is a consortium of 7 sites funded by the National Heart, Blood, and Lung Institute and charged with advancing the use of cell therapy for treating heart disease.

In 2013 he was honored for his pioneering clinical research and named a McNair Scholar at THI and appointed Clinical Professor of Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. He is the Director of Interventional Cardiology at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center (BSLMC), as well as the Medical Director of the BSLMC Cardiac Catheterization Laboratories.