Dear All

On behalf of prof. Jolanta Rędowicz, I would like to cordially invite you to the next Nencki Institute Seminar, on the 5^th of October at 3pm in the CN lecture hall. We will host prof. Elisabeth Ehler, who is a professor of cardiac cell biology at the Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine at the King’s College London. Prof. Ehler will give a talk entitled: Heart Disease - what goes wrong inside the cells.

Abstract

The heart is the first organ to function in the embryo and due to its limited capacity for regeneration diseases of the heart are amongst the major killers in the world. We want to find out what goes wrong at the level of the cells in heart disease in order to develop potential treatment strategies. The two main diseases that we have investigated are hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) and dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) and we could establish that different parts of the cells are affected in these two different types of heart disease. While HCM primarily affects the function of the myofibrils, DCM is mainly accompanied by changes in the cytoskeleton of the cells. In addition to these alterations, we found that changed activities in kinase signalling accompanies the disease and that ways of interfering with this can prevent the expression of a disease phenotype in cell and animal models for the disease.

The seminar will be followed by a get together.

With best wishes
Aleksandra Pękowska