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.