Thursday, 11 October | 9:30 am
Professor, Stanford Cardiovascular Institute and Department of MedicinePalo Alto, CA, USA
High Throughput Kinetic Studies of PatientiPSC-Cardiomyocytes to Probe Heart Disease
(Host: M. Giacca)
Current drug therapies to treat heart failure act through relatively few targets, and heart failure continues to be a major cause of mortality worldwide. The cost of new medicines continues to skyrocket, arguably because of the high failure rate and lack of innovative and selective new targets. Patient iPSC- derived cardiomyocytes could revolutionize the discovery of new drug by introducing aspects of the patient’s clinical presentation into the earliest stages of the discovery process.
We have developed tools to conduct large scale unbiased screens to decipher disease mechanisms and identify drugs that work by completely novel mechanisms. Our focus is on developing new therapies for cardiac arrhythmia, which is estimated to be involved in over half of all cardiac-related deaths, and the loss of contractile function in dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), which is the major indication for heart transplantation.
I will discuss specific case studies using this technology to support the medicinal chemistry optimization of a small molecule anti-arrhythmic drug and to probe target space for arrhythmia susceptibility and DCM.