Principal Investigator

Associate Professor

David Elliott

Associate Professor David Elliott’s research focuses on understanding how the heart develops and what happens during heart disease. His goal is to identify and develop new treatment options for people with heart muscle disease.

Associate Professor David Elliott
Associate Professor
David Elliott
Location: MCRI, Australia

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Associate Professor David Elliott’s work focuses on using human heart muscle cells made from human pluripotent stem cells to understand heart disease and identify new treatment options. His laboratory works on heart muscle diseases, called cardiomyopathies, and uses lab-grown heart tissues – commonly referred to as heart organoids – to understand how disease develops. Associate Professor Elliott particularly focuses on identifying drugs that stop the heart damage that can occur during chemotherapy, which is used to treat cancers. Hopefully, these drugs will help improve the heart health of childhood cancer survivors.

Associate Professor Elliott is a principal investigator at the reNEW Centre for Stem Cell Medicine and in parallel leads the Heart Disease Group at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Melbourne. He also co-directs, with Associate Professor Rachel Conyers, the Australian Cardio-Oncology Registry (ACOR), a national program targeted at improving long-term cardiac health outcomes for childhood cancer survivors.

The focus of Associate Professor Elliott’s laboratory is to develop pluripotent stem cell-based models of heart disease and use these models to find new therapies for heart disease. Throughout his career, he has made important contributions to understanding the molecular mechanisms behind the development of the heart muscle, its function, and heart disease.

reNEW researchers have a strong track record of scientific excellence in stem cell biology

They have performed pioneering work in stem cell research spanning different tissue and cell types, different technological advances and different stages of applied research. This provides an unprecedented international opportunity to utilise the combined wealth of knowledge, complementary skills sets and clinical experience across reNEW to push stem cell discoveries toward translational outcomes.