Dr. Todd Rosengart, professor and chair of the Michael E. DeBakey Department of Surgery at Baylor College of Medicine, has been named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. The 2025 NAI Fellowship cohort includes 169 academic and institutional inventors and 16 international fellows. The NAI Fellows Program highlights academic inventors who demonstrate a spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on the quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society.
At Baylor, Rosengart is DeBakey-Bard chair of surgery, professor of molecular and cellular biology and vice president of hospital operations and quality improvement. He also is a professor of heart and vascular disease at the Texas Heart Institute at Baylor.
Rosengart's research focuses on gene therapy, primarily for the treatment of cardiovascular disease. In 1997, he performed the world's first viral-based cardiac gene therapy, injecting a virus into the heart of a patient with end-stage coronary disease to grow "biologic bypasses," or therapeutic angiogenesis. This pivotal work eventually led to Rosengart's co-founding Xylocor Therapeutics, which is now in phase 2B trials being conducted internationally to evaluate patients with advanced coronary disease who are not candidates for bypass or angioplasty.
"Using a small catheter, we can inject the virus directly into the heart muscle to have the heart grow its own bypasses," said Rosengart. "In prior trials, we've seen that the patients have gotten better. Their angina or chest pain has been remarkably reduced. We now have objective data showing that blood flow to the heart is also improved."
For patients who have a history of heart attack, the heart muscle is replaced with scar tissue that is not functional, leading to heart failure. Rosengart and his team also have now created a combination of genes that, when injected into the scar tissue, convert scar cells, also called fibroblasts, into beating heart muscle cells. This novel approach represents a potential new treatment for heart failure patients who might otherwise require heart transplantation or mechanical heart support.
"I am honored to be elected as a 2025 NAI fellow. I am proud that this election reflects the work I and our team have been advancing for more than 30 years," said Rosengart. "It's very rewarding to have been able to take this from being a clinical problem to the benchtop and back to the clinic in a true example of a learning health system strategy, and I am pleased to continue this work here at Baylor College of Medicine."
The 2025 NAI Fellow class includes academic inventors from 127 universities, government agencies and research institutions across the United States. They will be inducted at the 15th Annual Conference, held June 4, 2026, in Los Angeles.
Read the complete list of the Class of 2025 NAI Fellows here.
