Our Work in 18 Minutes

If you have a few minutes, please see below a great talk that Dr. Martin gave at the Cardiovascular Bioengineering (CVBE) Symposium in Göttingen, Germany. In this video, he presents our work spanning 15 years, focusing on Hippo signaling, a network of genes that works as a STOP signal for growth in heart development and regeneration.

A summary: In 2008, our team made the landmark discovery that the Hippo signaling pathway controls heart growth during development. Building on this finding, we showed a few years later that this pathway inhibits heart regeneration in mammals. Together, this work highlighted how manipulating Hippo signaling could potentially enhance heart repair in humans following acute or chronic injury. In recent years, we performed translational work in pigs, showing that gene therapy-mediated silencing of Hippo in the infarcted heart induces a robust repair response and functional recovery. Our 15-year journey of basic science discoveries and translational innovation has significantly improved our understanding of the mechanisms of heart regeneration. This has paved the way for regenerative treatments that could revolutionize our approach to heart disease and significantly improve patient outcomes.