CVRTI Muscle Biology Program

The CVRTI Muscle Biology Program is focused on advancing our understanding of the biology of cardiac muscle in health and disease. The program consists of Stavros Drakos, MD, PhD (Director), Erik Blackwood, PhD, TingTing Hong, MD, PhD, and Craig Selzman, MD.

The Drakos Lab is focused on myocardial recovery. To investigate cardiac recovery mechanisms, the lab is using human myocardial tissue from cardiac recovery patients to guide their basic science investigations which include knockout, inhibition or overexpression strategies in vitro and in vivo. With this approach they identified novel therapeutic targets for myocardial recovery in chronic heart failure: MCT4 inhibition, (b) VDAC2 activation, (c) the glucose accessory pathways pentose-phosphate and 1-carbon metabolism and (d) RUNX1 inhibition. The Hong Lab focuses on studying how heart muscle cells organize and remodel in normal and failing hearts. The ultimate research goal is to identify, at the bench, new molecular and cellular targets that can be translated to develop new therapeutic tools for clinical management of heart failure. The Selzman lab focuses on the basic, translational, and clinical aspects of ischemia reperfusion injury as well as the study of mechanisms and treatments for heart failure and myocardial recovery. Several models have been historically utilized to better define the transcriptional regulation and pathologic events associated with pressure overload, ischemic injury, and cardiac remodeling. More recently, attention has been directed at the role of human amniotic products in modifying the inflammatory response and it impact on cardiac remodeling.