comparative approaches to cardiovascular medicine

All heart attacks and 87% of strokes involve ischemic events in which cardiac and brain tissues are damaged because blood flow is limited or prevented, resulting in oxygen deprivation. Unfortunately, human cardiac muscle cells and central nervous tissue can only survive for a few minutes of oxygen deprivation before irreversible injury accumulates, either during the ischemic period, or afterwards, when the tissue is reperfused with blood and oxygen.

Evolution has produced huge variation in animal responses to oxygen deprivation, both within human populations and across different species. For example, babies and children can tolerate longer periods of oxygen deprivation without injury than can adults [2], while a host of fish, frog, and turtle species can tolerate minutes — even hours — of oxygen deprivation without obvious injury to their brain or heart [3].

merging expertise across disciplines

Within SLU’s College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Medicine, there exists significant expertise in biochemistry, physiology, molecular biology, computational biology, and clinical cardiovascular medicine. Our goal is to combine this expertise into a translational research approach to overcome the inefficiencies of traditional research.

Our methods include modern informatics and ‘omics’ approaches to identify important genes, gene products, and metabolites that underlie ischemia tolerance, as well as genetic and epigenetic biomarkers for early diagnosis and prevention of ischemic injury. We undertake these studies in hearts and brains of mammalian, zebrafish, and reptilian models of ischemia.