Naomi Hamburg
Boston University, MA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Obesity and type 2 diabetes raise the risk of heart attacks, strokes and early aging of the blood vessels. Long before any of these problems appear, the endothelium starts to change.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Physiology
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
endothelial cells
endothelial dysfunction
vascular biology
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2028
What they work on
- Test whether type 2 diabetes and related cardiometabolic traits are linked to organelle stress (mitochondrial dysfunction and ER stress) in fresh endothelial cells from 450 Framingham Heart Study participants.
- Measure nitric oxide signaling, a key chemical signal that helps blood vessels relax, in human endothelial cells, and relate it to cardiometabolic disease status in a nested case-control sample.
- Use RNA sequencing of endothelial cells from 900 Framingham participants to find gene expression programs linked to endothelial health, cardiometabolic traits and blood metabolite profiles.
- Combine deep endothelial cell phenotyping with existing Framingham metabolite and genomic data to rank molecular pathways that may underlie cardiovascular risk.
More about the research
The endothelium is the thin layer of cells that lines every blood vessel. This makes it a promising place to step in and protect the heart. The central question is how metabolic disease damages these lining cells. The proposed hypothesis is that 'organelle stress' drives the damage. This means strain on the cell's internal machinery, such as malfunctioning mitochondria (the cell's power plants) and stress in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER, where proteins are folded).
Why it matters
Obesity, diabetes and heart disease are becoming more common. By showing how cardiometabolic disease changes the cells lining blood vessels, this work may reveal new molecular causes of cardiovascular risk. These findings could point to ways of preventing or treating vascular damage in people with obesity or type 2 diabetes. The large shared resource of human endothelial cell data may also help other vascular biology researchers.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Michal Laniado Schwartzman
New York Medical College, NY·Pharmacology
Test whether removing Gpr75 only from endothelial cells, the cells lining blood vessels, protects mice from diet-driven obesity, high blood sugar, insulin resistance and hypertension.
James Ross
Case Western Reserve University, OH·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Define how free hemoglobin lowers nitric oxide availability and triggers endothelial injury in human endothelial cell models, and test whether haptoglobin, a hemoglobin-binding protein, reduces these effects.
Abeer Mohamed
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Physiology
Investigate whether glycosphingolipid-rich adiposomes, vesicles released by fat tissue, disrupt the membranes of blood vessel lining cells and cause endothelial dysfunction in obese adults with type 2 diabetes.
The school
Boston University: 26 labs on PI Pages, $784M a year on research, 630 research doctorates a year.
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