Unraveling Cardiac Maturation to improve Congenital Heart Disease Therapies

The goal of this project is to study the process of cardiac maturation, which involves changes that happen in the heart from birth to adulthood. There are many differences between a newborn heart and an adult heart, including the size of the contractile cells as well as the abundance of other cell types that are present in the heart. There are currently no medical therapies that are specific to pediatric patients with heart disease and that is in part because we don't know how the pediatric heart is different from the adult heart. Our studies will lay the groundwork on which we can begin to develop regenerative strategies and medical therapies for pediatric patients with heart disease.