The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award to Nathaniel Huebsch, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.
With a five-year $695,746 CAREER award, Huebsch will grow heart muscle in the lab that is more representative of adult heart tissue and use that muscle to predict how drugs will affect patients’ hearts. CAREER awards support junior faculty who model the role of teacher-scholar through outstanding research, excellence in education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organization.
“Currently, heart muscle grown in the lab is more similar to heart muscle in a fetus than an adult,” Huebsch said. “We need to create lab-grown heart muscle that does a better job at predicting how real patients’ heart muscle will respond to drugs. This is going to be especially useful for developing cures for genetically inherited diseases. It will also help us understand how to avoid cardiac side effects of drugs that are used to treat diseases like cancer; provide guidance on whether emerging therapies will work on certain diseases such as arrhythmias; and determine if there are more effective times for the application of therapies.”
Read more on the McKelvey Engineering website.
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