Cardiac iPSCs for Drug Discovery

About the Speaker
Dr. Wu is Director of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute and Professor in the Department of Medicine (Cardiology) and Department of Radiology (Molecular Imaging Program) at the Stanford School of Medicine. Dr. Wu received his medical degree from Yale and completed his medicine residency and cardiology fellowship training followed by a PhD (molecular pharmacology) at UCLA. Dr. Wu has received several awards, including the Burroughs Wellcome Foundation Career Award in Medical Sciences, Baxter Foundation Faculty Scholar Award, AHA Innovative Research Award, AHA Established Investigator Award, NIH Director?s New Innovator Award, NIH Roadmap Transformative Award, and Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers given out by President Obama. He is on the editorial board of Journal Clinical Investigation, Circulation Research, Circulation Cardiovascular Imaging, JACC Imaging, Human Gene Therapy, Molecular Therapy, Stem Cell Research, and Journal of Nuclear Cardiology. He is a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of University Cardiologists. His clinical activities involve adult congenital heart disease and cardiovascular imaging.
AbstractHeart disease is the cause of morbidity and mortality in the industrialized world. While the use of human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSCs) in regenerative medicine is a long-term goal. Recent technological advancement has enabled the generation of patient-specific and disease-specific human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (iPSC-CMs) in vitro. iPSC-CMs carry all the genetic information and therefore may be an ideal platform for elucidating disease modeling, drug screening, and cell therapy. Here I will discuss recent advances in this technology in the cardiovascular field.