Inherited heart muscle disease is common – affecting around 1 in 200 people. It runs in families and can cause heart failure or sudden death. We can now identify the faulty genes, but still need to understand why they make the heart muscle fall apart. Without that, there is little to treat: symptoms can be relieved, but not cured. My aim is to unravel what makes the heart muscle break, and to identify drugs that prevent the breakdown.
reNEW research
You cannot take heart muscle from a patient and study it in a dish. So we grow it in our lab: heart muscle cells from human stem cells carrying a patient’s exact fault, next to a healthy version that differs only in that one change. We compare them under the microscope, especially the proteins that build the machinery behind the heartbeat. Combined with force and molecular analysis, this shows us what is going wrong, and where to tackle it.
Image description
Heart muscle grown from human stem cells: striped machinery pulled apart, and the beat with it.
Credits
Dr. Antonia T.L. Zech, Postdoc, Porrello and Elliott labs, reNEW Melbourne.
