Center for Cardiovascular and Muscular Diseases CCMD
Distinguished Cardiovascular and Muscular Diseases Seminar Series
Speaker
Deepak Srivastava, MD
President
Director, Roddenberry Stem Cell Center
Gladstone Institutes
Professor of Pediatrics and Biochemistry & Biophysics
UCSF Medical Center
UC San Francisco
Seminar Abstract: Heart disease remains a leading cause of death in adults and children. By leveraging the signaling, transcriptional, and translational networks that guide cardiac development, we have reprogrammed disease-specific human cells into iPS cells to model genetically defined heart disease and uncover mechanisms that drive disease progression. We have also used key cardiac developmental factors to directly reprogram resident cardiac fibroblasts into cardiomyocyte-like cells, revealing the epigenetic mechanisms underlying this cell-fate switch. These insights into cardiac differentiation provide strategies for generating cardiac cell types for disease modeling and regenerative approaches and may inform new treatments for human heart disease.