Advertisement
Honoring the contributions of Drs. Michael S. Brown and Joseph L. Goldstein to the training of the next generation of scientists, this award is the highest honor for research accomplishment bestowed by the Graduate School on a postdoctoral research fellow. Dr. Lebek’s research projects have focused on understanding the pathologic mechanisms of common cardiovascular diseases and developing new therapeutic strategies against them. He found an overactivation of the stress-responsive enzyme CaMKIIδ in myocardial biopsies from patients with sleep apnea, which resulted in proarrhythmic alterations of the myocardial sodium and calcium homeostasis and subsequent multicellular arrhythmias.
He then identified an ATP-competitive CaMKIIδ inhibitor that improved myocardial function and blocked arrhythmias in patients’ biopsies. As conventional compound-based strategies often face significant limitations that preclude clinical translation, Dr. Lebek conceived the idea of using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to modulate pathogenic CaMKIIδ. He developed several gene editing strategies that improved survival and conferred cardioprotection against various heart disease entities in mice.
Moving toward clinical translation, he generated a humanized CaMKIIδ knock-in mouse model to deploy the editing strategies optimized for the human genome in vivo in adult mice. Use of a heart-specific promoter restricted the editing exclusively to cardiomyocytes, thereby reducing the risk of potential side effects. Dr. Lebek’s work, which has appeared in the journal Science and Circulation, may thus lead to an advanced strategy for heart disease therapy.
We invite you to support Dr. Simon Lebek in his excellent work by attending his University Lecture titled "Precise Gene Editing as a Therapy for Cardiovascular Diseases" in April 2024.
Advertisement
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
6001 Forest Park Rd, Dallas, TX 75235, United States