Karen Hirschi, PhD, Alumni Professor of Cell Biology, Director of the Developmental Genomics Center, Associate Director of the UVA MSTP, and member of the Robert M. Berne Cardiovascular Research Center, and Gael Genet, PhD, Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Cell Biology were awarded a $3 million, four-year NIH Multi-PI R01 grant to study the role in arterial-venous specification during development and in disease conditions.
The Hirschi lab focuses on understanding how blood vessels form during normal development in order to find new therapeutic strategies to promote healthy embryonic development, repair of injured tissues, and engineering of tissue replacements. Mature blood vascular networks require arterial vessels that deliver oxygen-rich blood to tissues and venous vessels that return oxygen-low blood to the heart. However, it is not well understood how endothelial cells that line all these blood vessels acquire different characteristics in arteries vs. veins that enable them to perform distinct functions within the blood circulatory network. This has created significant roadblocks for clinical therapies, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.
Read more at UVA’s Medicine in Motion News.