Her grandfather’s death lies at the heart of her research. Thanks to her, other hearts keep beating.

Cardiovascular disease is often called the “biggest unsolved mystery in cardiology.” More than six million Americans live with chronic congestive heart failure, which is the inability of the heart to effectively pump blood around the body. In advanced stages, that can feel like an eternal state of breathlessness. Acts as simple as combing hair and brushing teeth can leave patients exhausted beyond belief.

And though 3,500 heart transplants are performed in the U.S. each year, that barely even begins to address the vast number of those in heart failure praying for a healthy heart. TingTing Hong is no stranger to that prayer.

TingTing grew up on the southeast coast of China, three hours south of Shanghai. Members of her family had histories of stroke and coronary artery disease, but it was her adored 72-year-old grandfather’s death that particularly troubled her. He was diagnosed with heart failure but refused to attend the nearest hospital. Instead, each time he had an episode, he went to a local rural clinic that had few resources. Impatient, he accelerated the drip speed of his IV medication, which led to his eventual demise.

The devastating experience led TingTing to become a physician at Peking University. From there, she attended the University of Michigan and earned a PhD in cardiovascular pharmacology (opportunity to describe this field here) before digging into molecular mechanisms and cell biology.

Eventually, TingTing made her way to Utah and started her own research lab in 2013. Here she continued her long-time collaboration with Robin M. Shaw, a fellow heart researcher who—alongside his passion for the biology of the heart—cared deeply for empowering the next generation of cardiac experts.

For her, a partnership with University of Utah Health researchers simply made sense. Forty years earlier, it was where the world’s first permanent artificial heart was implanted in a human being. Before that day, total artificial hearts had only been used as a mechanical stand-in until a donor heart became available. That first brave patient was Barney Clark—a 61-year-old Utah-born, Seattle-based dentist and war veteran who was entering the terminal stages of heart failure.

Barney lived for 112 days, eventually succumbing to complications that led to multiple organ failure. His doctor and wife Una eventually agreed that it was time to turn off his still perfectly functioning artificial heart.

His pioneering sacrifice helped lay the foundation for many cardiac advances at U of U Health, including the recent discovery of the cardiac BIN1 protein. TingTing and Robin were central to this last discovery. Together they burrowed down and discovered a key heart cell protein they named cardiac BIN1. They found that the levels of B1N1 decreased in a failing heart. But if the protein was directly injected into failing hearts in mice, the condition could be reversed. When they tested their discovery on pigs, they stumbled upon yet another breakthrough—the gene therapy completely normalized the heart’s size and the rate it pumped blood.

TingTing recalls that moment in the lab as bittersweet. She couldn’t help but think about her grandfather and all the heart failure patients she had treated in ICUs in China who died waiting for a transplant. Perhaps—one day—she’d be able to save these patients, and even better develop treatments for early-stage heart failure so patients would never have to walk through the hospital doors. Inspired by her grandfather’s memory, her work inches closer to making that dream a reality.