Nicholas Tassy-Becz Rose Hills
discovering mechanisms of cell proliferation
The newborn heart possesses a remarkable ability to regenerate after injury, yet this capacity vanishes within days of birth and never returns. Understanding what drives this window of regeneration is one of the central questions in cardiac biology, and answering it could one day inform new treatments for heart disease, the leading cause of death worldwide. My research has established that activating Wnt signaling in the neonatal mouse heart significantly expands the proliferative capacity of cardiac endothelial cells (the cells that compose the heart’s blood vessels). Despite this, the same activation in adult mice yields no change, meaning the pathway is critical to the loss of regenerative capacity as mice age. We are now working to understand the deeper molecular and structural consequences of this vascular expansion, and what it reveals about why regenerative capacity is lost as the heart matures. By tracing how the cardiac vascular network responds to Wnt activation we hope to identify the mechanisms that make the neonatal heart uniquely plastic, and whether any aspect of that plasticity could eventually be leveraged in the context of cardiac injury and repair.
Message To Sponsor
Thank you for the support on this project, which will allow me to devote more time over the summer towards the advancements of regenerative medicine and contribute to the collective knowledge of the interworkings of the cell. I am deeply committed to producing work that reflects the confidence this award places in both my potential as a researcher and the significance of the questions being pursued.