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Heart Functions & Genetics Theme


Background

Our Group uses state-of-the-art approaches to discover genes that cause heart and artery diseases. We do this by integrating advanced cardiovascular phenotyping with molecular datasets to derive novel insights into human disease. The Group has a particular interest in understanding the disease mechanisms that cause systolic and diastolic heart failure due genetic and genomic triggers. The overall aim of our research is to identify new ways of preventing, diagnosing, stratifying and treating patients with cardiovascular disease.

The Group has strong collaborations with Duke-NUS, Imperial College (UK), Max Delbruck Centre (Germany) and Harvard Medical School (USA). The group uses bioinformatics, next generation sequencing approaches, iPSC technology, rodent models of disease, cell and molecular biology and applied cardiovascular physiology to address areas of clinical need.

Research Area

  1. Cardiac fibrosis and its role in the heart
  2. Genetic determinants of cardiac form and function in health
  3. Genetic determinants of inherited heart muscle diseases
  4. Cardiac MRI studies of the cardiovascular system in health and disease
  5. Titin cardiomyopathy

Achievements

Grants

  1. NMRC STaR Award (Prof Stuart Cook) "Integrated multi-phenotype and systems-level analysis of human heart failure"

Publications

  1. Multinational study: Environmental and genetic causes may lead to  1% of healthy individuals in the world with a gene mutation having heart failure- LianHe Zaobao Newspaper Article
  2. Schafer S, de Marvao A, Adami E, Fiedler L, Ng B, Khin E, Cook SA.  Titin truncating variants affect the heart in health and disease.  Nature Genetics, 49 (1), 46-53.  2016