Professor Enzo Porrello is a leader in creating three-dimensional beating human heart tissue derived from human pluripotent stem cells. Such stem cells have the ability to become almost any cell type in the human body. Professor Porrello uses this heart tissue to understand heart development and disease, and to develop regenerative therapies for heart failure. One important area of his research is using stem cells to generate heart tissue in the lab to work towards treatments for heart failure in children. Professor Porrello’s research aims to ultimately explore and develop drugs that can use our heart’s dormant regenerative capacity and awaken the ability of the heart to repair itself following damage.

Professor Porrello directs the Melbourne node of the recently established reNEW Centre for Stem Cell Medicine, where he also is principal investigator. He is additionally the theme director of Stem Cell Biology and head of the Heart Regeneration Group at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne and the founding co-director of the Melbourne Centre for Cardiovascular Genomics and Regenerative Medicine (CardioRegen). Professor Porrello’s research focuses on the development of regenerative therapies for children and adults with heart failure.

Over the course of his career, he has made important contributions to our understanding of mammalian heart regeneration and has pioneered the development of human organoids, mini organs, for drug discovery. Professor Porrello is a co-founder of Dynomics, a biotechnology company focused on the development of new heart failure treatments using organoid technologies.