Ischemic heart disease is the leading cause of mortality worldwide and the largest unmet medical need for non-communicable diseases. When the ischemic insult is severe enough a cascade of detrimental events is initiated, and include formation of a noncontractile scar, heart failure and lethal arrhythmias because the adult human heart cannot regenerate itself. 
Conventional therapeutic strategies include re-opening of the coronary arteries and generic pharmacological therapies, but none of these treatments can rescue the damaged heart tissue. An appealing avenue to achieve cardiac regeneration is to modulate heart muscle cell proliferation by the processes that control heart muscle cell renewal as it occurs in newborn human hearts or simpler species such as zebrafish. Matching this approach, promoting the generation of blood vessels in endothelial cells also hold strong potential to revive the damaged myocardium. 
Partners of the RECREATE consortium are in the forefront of these fields and have discovered new therapeutic targets modes of actions involving protein-coding genes and non-coding RNAs that control cardiomyocyte proliferation and blood vessel production in endothelial cells. All RECREATE partners have longstanding expertise delivering new knowledge towards new therapeutic strategies. They are experts in the fields of heart failure, RNA biology, computational analysis and advance disease models. Rather than each expert working on their ‘own’ field, these experts collectively collaborate to break through the current state-of-the-art and bring forward a completely novel therapeutic approach for ischemic heart disease. Beside leading academic institutions across Europe, a nation-wide patient organisation and a cardiac regeneration focused biotech company are committed to improve the design, implementation and valorisation of the project’s work plan and outcomes.