Novel inhibitors of MAP4K4 (HGK), an acute therapy to prevent cardiac muscle cell death following myocardial infarction

A heart attack kills heart muscle cells, and the heart cannot rebuild them. Professor Michael Schneider at Imperial College London has identified an enzyme called MAP4K4 that drives this cell death, and he has designed drug-like compounds that block it. This matters because current treatments for heart attacks—clot-busting drugs and stents—restore blood flow but do nothing to stop the muscle cells that are already injured from dying. The heart’s inability to regenerate means every lost cell permanently weakens the organ. If MAP4K4 inhibitors can protect those jeopardised cells, they could be given alongside standard therapy to limit the damage. If the research succeeds, the compounds could become a new class of acute treatment for heart attacks, reducing the long-term disability and heart failure that follow. The project uses human cardiac muscle grown from stem cells to test the inhibitors, which moves the work closer to clinically workable drugs. This is not fundamental science—it is a targeted drug development programme with a clear practical endpoint: a medicine that could be injected during a heart attack to save muscle that would otherwise be lost.