Daniel Garry
University of Minnesota, MN·Medicine & Clinical Research
There are far fewer donor hearts than there are people with failing hearts or blocked blood vessels. The research looks for new ways to supply hearts and to regrow blood vessels.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Genetics
Biology
- Topics
heart transplantation
heart failure
xenotransplantation
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Oct 2029
What they work on
- Test whether GFP-labeled pig stem cells with mismatched MHC immune genes can rescue pig embryos lacking the heart-building genes NKX2-5, TBX5 and HAND2, using blastocyst complementation.
- Test whether macaque induced pluripotent stem cells can rescue heartless NKX2-5/TBX5/HAND2-null pig embryos in vitro, as a step toward cross-species organ growth.
- Generate a macaque heart inside a gene-edited NKX2-5/TBX5/HAND2-null pig host, creating a primate-pig platform for future humanized hearts.
- Define how ETV2, a pioneer factor that opens packaged DNA, specifies blood-vessel lining cells during embryo development and reprogramming, using ATAC-seq, MNase-seq and ChIP-seq in engineered mice.
- Determine how chromatin-modifying factors and ETV2 act together, and identify factors that boost ETV2-driven endothelial reprogramming in vitro and in an adult mouse heart-injury model.
More about the research
One approach grows a heart from donor cells inside a gene-edited pig. Another studies the genetic switches that tell stem cells to become blood-vessel cells. Both rely on understanding the earliest genetic steps that build the heart and blood vessels during development.
Why it matters
End-stage heart failure is curable only by transplantation, and donor hearts are scarce. Pigs that grow primate, and eventually human, hearts could become a new source of organs. Peripheral artery disease leads to more than 150,000 limb amputations a year in the U.S., and current options are limited to amputation and bypass grafting. Learning how ETV2 drives blood-vessel formation could guide therapies that regrow vessels after injury or disease.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Shahin Rafii
Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research
Identify transcription factors that give endothelial cells organ-specific identities by growing ETV2-engineered R-VECs and stem-cell-derived iVECs with heart, lung and blood organoids or in injured mice, then using RNA profiling and motif discovery.
Hongchao Guo
University of Utah, UT·Physiology·Early-career
Test whether a signaling chain from reactive oxygen species through the transcription factors FOXO1 and KLF5 to IL-18 and IL-1β drives endothelial dysfunction, using iPSC-derived endothelial cells and transgenic mice carrying the ALDH2*2 variant.
Lei Yang
Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, IN·Biology
Determine how the human lncRNA MCRL1 and its partner protein β-Catenin switch on heart genes and switch off blood genes during mesoderm specification. The work uses MCRL1-knockout human embryonic stem cells differentiated toward heart cells.
The school
University of Minnesota: 88 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 722 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.