AHA, Children’s Heart Foundation award funds to research in congenital heart defects

The American Heart Association and the Children’s Heart Foundation announced they committed $917,426 to further research in congenital heart defects.

The funding represents the eighth round of a commitment. The groups have pledged $14.3 million to fund congenital heart defects research over 10 years, according to a press release.

Mitchell S.V. Elkind

“By funding research directly related to advancing the prevention, , we are investing critical resources for more children to survive into healthy adulthoods,” Mitchell S.V. Elkind, MD, MS, FAHA, FAAN, president of the AHA, professor of neurology and epidemiology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and attending neurologist at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, said in the release. “Research is the foundation of the American Heart Association. Supporting innovative research saves and improves the lives of children, and that is of utmost importance to us.”

In the eighth round the Congenital Heart Defect Research Awards program, funding will be distributed among eight research projects nationwide. The funding was awarded to:

• Barbara Gonzalez Teran, PhD, postdoctoral fellow in cardiovascular biology at Gladstone Institutes at the J. David Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, for work in exploring dysregulation of two protein coding gene interactions by a congenital heart defect-associated variant and its impact on heart development;
• Benjamin Streeter, PhD candidate at Emory University, for work on electrospun polycaprolactone-based patches, tissue-compatible biomaterial, for enhancing cardiac progenitor cell reparative potential;
• Dulguun Amgalan, PhD, postdoctoral research fellow in genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine, for work in regulatory maps of endothelial cell differentiation to connect congenital heart disease risk variants to target genes;
• Mingkun Wang, PhD, postdoctoral associate at the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering at Cornell University, for work in mechanical regulation of YAP/TAZ activity, proteins which shuttle between the cytoplasm and the nucleus in response to multiple inputs, in the growth and maturation of atrioventricular valve;
• Devin Laurence, graduate research assistant at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma, for work on in-silico guided assessment and management of tricuspid regurgitation in patients with hypoplastic left heart syndrome;
• Sathiyanarayanan Manivannan, PhD, postdoctoral scientist at the research institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, for work in developmental origins of hypoplastic left heart syndrome examined using genetically linked RBFOX2 variants;
• Alexis Leigh Krup, PhD candidate at the University of California, San Francisco, for work in dissecting specification of cardiac precursor cells at single cell resolution; and
• Jennifer Klein, MD, FAAP, pediatrician at Children’s National Medical Center and Children’s Research Institute in Washington, D.C., for work in mapping the geographic distribution of congenital heart disease and associated neurologic outcomes.

“At The Children’s Heart Foundation, funding the most promising congenital heart disease research is our sole mission,” Kevin Slawin, chairman of the Children’s Heart Foundation’s board of directors, said in the release. “Through this collaboration and our ongoing commitment to this important work, we strive to make a lasting impact in the lives of congenital heart disease patients and their families.”