Heart Failure and Transplantation
This Strategic Research Area is chaired by Dan Bernstein, MD, and Euan Ashley, MRCP, DPhil.
| Ashley, Euan, MD, DPhil |
| Bernstein, Daniel MD |
| Brenner, Jacob |
Brown, Marguerite RN, MSN |
| Chin, Clifford MD |
| Constantinou, Chris MD |
| Dolmetsch, Ricardo E PhD |
| Ennis, Daniel B. PhD |
| Fowler, Michael MD |
| Goldstein, Mary K MD, MS |
| Goris, Michael L MD, PhD |
| Haddad, Francois MD |
| Haq, Furqan MD |
| Heidenreich, Paul A MD, MS |
| Hofmann, Rusty MD |
| Hunt, Sharon A MD |
| Luikart, Helen I RN, MSN |
| Mayer, Dirk PhD |
| Ottoboni, Linda RN |
| Patterson, Andrew MD, PhD |
| Pavlovic, Aleksandra |
| Rabkin, Ralph MD |
| Rosenthal, David MD |
| Reitz, Bruce MD |
| Vagelos, Randall MD |
| Walton, G Brant MD |
| Wang, Jack MD |
| Witteles, Ronald MD |
| Zenios, Stefanos, PhD |
With 2007 Institute seed funding, the Heart Failure/Transplant group is continuing research in Cardiomyopathy with a new project: High Throughput Mutation Detection in Familial Cardiomyopathy. Drs. Bernstein and Ashley, pediatric and adult cardiologists, respectively, areo co-investigators.
The mission of the Stanford Cardiomyopathy Working Group is nothing less than to find a cure for cardiomyopathy and to prevent the development of cardiomyopathy in those patients not yet affected. We aim to do this through bett 9Cer understanding of every aspect of the disease, from genetics to physiology to pharmacology to bioengineering. To understand the disease better, we needed to know as much as modern biomedicine could tell us about every patient affected. We needed to have the ability to examine samples of these patients’ heart tissue and have a mechanism in place to assess their proteins and DNA. In simple terms, we needed a tissue bank and database.
We made the establishment of this resource our number one priority, made possible by combining a generous grant from a private family with a Stanford Cardiovascular Institute 2006 Seed Grant ("Cardiovascular Genomics/Proteomics Program and Core Facility"). Already, the tissue bank and database contains over 600 patients in the clinical database and hundreds of tissue and/or blood samples banked. We are embarking upon an initial series of genetics-based experiments.
The goal of the first study is to describe the genetic determinants of dramatic response to therapy. All cardiomyopathy doctors are aware of a wide spectrum of response to medical or device therapy in our patients. Our hypothesis is that understanding which patients respond to our current therapies will teach us not only about the root cause of the disease but allow us to tailor current therapies with much more precision. Although simple in conception, the ambition of this experiment is an order of magnitude greater than anything previously attempted in the field of heart failure research.
To assess genetic determinants, we have begun designing a tool to assess variation in genes relevant to cardiomyopathy. This tool will be based on a technology invented at Stanford: the microarray or gene chip. This work is the foundation for the "High Throughput Mutation Detection in Familial Cardiomyopathy" study.
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