Cardiovascular Program

Funding

• NHLBI
• NIAID

The Cardiovascular and Metabolic Program aims at advancing the knowledge of prevalent cardiovascular and metabolic diseases and accelerating the development of new therapeutic and diagnostic strategies. The program brings together scientists from multiple communities within MGH and Harvard. Collectively, the projects described below undertake a variety of systems-level analyses, including systematic mapping of genetic/functional interactions, functional genomics, and in vivo molecular imaging.

Atherosclerosis/Myocardial infarction

• Exploring the role of inflammatory networks in ischemic heart disease and stroke
• Major focus on monocyte/macrophage subsets, their function and ontogeny
• Chemical biology and genomic studies to assign function to susceptibility alleles for atherosclerosis or myocardial infarction
• Nanomaterial-based molecular imaging probes to define cellular and enzymatic components of plaque, and monitor disease progression and therapeutic response in pre-clinical studies and clinical trials

Metabolism and energetics

• Systematic mapping of metabolic pathways in health and disease using mass spectrometry-based metabolomics and proteomics
• Translational research in metabolic syndrome
• Functional genomics of mitochondrial function in diabetes and other human diseases

Stem cells and regeneration

• Role of hematopoietic stem cells in ischemic heart disease and stroke
• Small molecule approaches to direct differentiation of stem cells into the cardiac lineage
• Chemical screens in stem cells or model organisms to dissect developmental pathways and manipulate them for therapeutic benefit
• Nanoparticle-based imaging of transplanted stem cells in vivo

Novel biomarkers for diagnosis, clinical phenotyping and disease status

• Metabolites
• Cell-based phenotypes
• Nanoparticle-based molecular imaging
• Benchtop parallel measurement of multiplexed analytes