Research Interest

Area of Expertise and Primary Interest

• Disease Modeling with patient -specific induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPSC)
• Directed Differentiation of human iPSC into chamber specific functionalcardiomyocytes
• Genome editing of  hiPSCs
• Molecular cardiology
• RNAseq profiling and bioinformatics analysis
• Mutational Analysis of genetic disorders
• Direct conversion of skin cells into functional heart cells

Current Research
My overall research aim is centered on stem cell based regenerative medicine for cardiac arrhythmia and heart failure.
I am currently involved in the following 3 main projects:

• Disease Modeling for inherited cardiac arrhythmic diseases: Sudden cardiac death claims the lives of approximately 350,000 Americans each year and is  most often due to cardiac arrhythmias such as long QT (LQTS), short QT (SQTS) and Brugada (BrS) syndromes and has significant social and economical consequences. My current research is focused on delineation of molecular mechanisms underlying human cardiac arrhythmic diseases using a stem cell approach.  I have created in vitro models of Early Repolarization Syndrome, a recently highlighted cardiac sudden death syndrome,using induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived heart cells originating from skin fibroblasts of patients afflicted with this disease. These stem cell based disease models provide a source of heart cells that have the genetic defect that is impairing the function of the patient’s heart, enabling us to better understand the pathophysiology of the syndrome and custom-design patient-specific therapy, thus helping to usher in the era of “Personalized Medicine”.

• Generation of clinical grade stem cell derivedcardiomyocytes for therapy of heart failure: In the United States, 4.9 million patients suffer from heart failure. Heart transplantation is currently the last resort for end-stage heart failure, but is hampered by a severe shortage of donor organs and immune rejection. Cell replacement therapy is emerging as an innovative approach for the treatment of degenerative cardiac diseases. In order to address the shortage of donor hearts, I am involved in a project designed to obtain purified  population of chamber  (atrial/ventricular) specific and physiologically relevant mature iPSC derived cardiomyocytes with the use of the latest genome editing technologies (TALENS and CRISPR) and directed differentiation approach with chemically synthesized small molecules.
  
  
• Transdifferentiation of Skin Fibroblasts into Functional Cardiomyocytes for Safer and Robust Cell Replacement Therapy: My other area of investigation is focused on transdifferentiation, the direct conversion of skin fibroblasts or blood cells into heart cells, to enable the endogenous repair of injured/failing hearts, as an alternative to heart transplantation and as a parallel approach to stem cell based therapy of heart failure.