Single Ventricle Heart Disease Meeting
#SVIM2022 was held on October 6-9th at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront.
Representing the Martin Laboratory, Drs. Jim Martin and Diwakar Turaga recently attended the Single Ventricle Investigator Meeting (SVIM) in Baltimore, Maryland, hosted by Additional Ventures, a non-profit organization that funds our CHD genomics studies (please see our blog post for more info.). The SVIM 2022 meeting was aimed at connecting basic science, engineering, computational, and medical researchers to discuss single ventricle heart research in the areas of single ventricle etiology, complications & comorbidities, biological mechanisms of outcomes, and developing functional cures.
Dr. Jim Martin: Speaker, Etiology II: Mechanisms of Congenital Heart Disease session
As the SVRF 2021 Top Scorer, Dr. Martin presented our work in the Etiology II: Mechanisms of Congenital Heart Disease session on Saturday, October 8th. In his talk titled “Congenital heart disease at single-cell resolution“, Dr. Martin discussed our single nuclear RNA sequencing and imaging mass cytometry studies investigating CHDs, such as hypoplastic left heart syndrome. In his talk, Dr. Martin highlighted our discovery of a cardiomyocyte population (CM3, see below figure) that exhibits a cell state which can be used to diagnose CHDs. From the abstract: “Our comprehensive CHD phenotyping provides a first effort to develop pipelines and datasets for personalized medicine in CHD”.
Figure 2 from our 2022 genomics study published in Nature.
Dr. Diwakar Turaga: Poster, “Single-Cell Transcriptomic Analysis of Myocardial Remodeling after Ventricular Unloading in Pediatric Dilated Cardiomyopathy and HLHS“
At the poster session on Friday evening, Dr. Turaga presented our collaborative work with Dr. Iki Adachi at Texas Children’s Hospital, investigating the molecular mechanisms of HLHS and DCM and ventricular assist device (VAD) support. In this work, we performed single-cell sequencing of pre- and post-VAD pediatric CHD hearts and uncovered the cell composition and gene expression profiles after ventricular unloading. From his abstract: “Our analyses will elucidate critical pathways involved in myocardial remodeling after ventricular unloading in failing pediatric hearts“.
The Martin Laboratory is excited about our ongoing partnership with Additional Ventures in our mission to discover HLHS biomarkers and develop predictive models for CHDs. This research program has been very successful thus far, and we look forward to publishing our new findings very soon!