A Change of Heart: From Genetics of Congenital Heart Disease to Regenerative Medicine

A morning lecture with light refreshments by Deepak Srivastava, MD, President of Gladstone Institutes and professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Biochemistry & Biophysics at UC San Francisco. He will speak on “A Change of Heart: From Genetics of Congenital Heart Disease to Regenerative Medicine.”

The Srivastava lab is focused on the gene networks that guide the development of the heart, seeking to understand how aberrations in these pathways can cause congenital heart disease, and how they can use this knowledge to generate new cardiac cells to repair heart damage. One powerful approach they use is creating models of heart disease in a dish by reprogramming human cells from patients carrying mutations in cardiac developmental genes, editing them with CRISPR technology and analyzing changes at the single cell level. This has led them to discover perturbations in pivotal genetic pathways that contribute to disease, and identified the nodes that can be therapeutically targeted to restore heart cells to normal function.