NEXT TALK: Next talk 31st of October, 7pm - Sesonal mood disorders
Cittie Of Yorke, 22 High Holborn, WC1V 6BN
Repairing a broken heart: lessons from evolution and development
Wednesday, 10th of February 2016
This event is sponsored by The Company of Biologists. There will be free nibbles and drinks for the audience!
Heart disease is the world’s leading cause of death. An ischemic attack causes loss of muscle, which makes the heart function less efficiently, ultimately leading to its failure and death. Humans are incapable of growing new cardiac muscle tissue, but what if we could change that fundamental fact of our biology? Fish and salamanders can regenerate their hearts following injury, and as embryos, we grew a heart from scratch in utero. Can lessons from embryonic development and our cold-blooded relatives make death from heart attack a thing of the past?
Brian L. Black is Professor and Associate Director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute at the University of California, San Francisco, USA. The primary focus of the Black lab is control of gene expression in cardiovascular development, regeneration, and disease. Dr. Black received a B.S. in Biology from Furman University, a small liberal arts college in Greenville, South Carolina. He received a Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina for his work on mechanisms of host cell shutoff by vesicular stomatitis virus. Following his doctoral work, Dr. Black conducted postdoctoral studies with Dr. Eric Olson in Dallas, Texas, where he focused on transcriptional regulatory mechanisms in skeletal muscle, before moving to UCSF as an independent investigator in 1998.
