NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease has won around $10 million from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to study the gene networks that underlie heart defects.
GICD, located at the University of California, San Francisco, will use the funding over six years to continue its studies of the regulatory networks that control heart development.
"We know that specific genes have to be turned on and off during a relatively narrow developmental window to correctly build a human heart," GICD lead investigator and Professor Benoit Bruneau, said in a statement. "Understanding all of the regulatory networks that control heart development will have important implications for preventing and curing congenital heart disease," he said.
Bruneau said the research team also will use genome mapping techniques to identify transcription factors with known roles in heart development and disease.
GICD Director Deepak Srivastava has identified genetic causes of congenital heart diseases and will use pluripotent stem cells from patients with such transcription factor mutations to conduct the research.
"Our studies will yield an important and transformative epigenetic atlas of heart development, which will link for, the first time, transcriptional and epigenetic regulators in a comprehensive network that will illuminate mechanisms underlying CHDs," said Srivastava.