A Snapshot seminar hosted by the School of Physiology, Pharmacology and Neuroscience
Beck Richardson: Tissue repair following injury is common to all systems, but regeneration of damaged organs is relatively rare and incompletely understood. Inadequate repair mechanisms, and particularly the long-term presence of scar tissue, are especially detrimental in the heart and contribute to the development of heart failure in severely affected patients. Understanding how some vertebrate models are capable of endogenous tissue regeneration may help to develop new therapeutics for these patients. Zebrafish are a beneficial model system with multiple advantages. Adult zebrafish are naturally capable of tissue regeneration and have facilitated our understanding of the contribution of non-myocyte cells in the cardiac microenvironment to the regenerative process. I will describe some of the work we have done to contribute to this by investigating how different immune cell populations facilitate cardiac regeneration in zebrafish. As well as being naturally regenerative, zebrafish are all also highly genetically tractable and show high homology to mammals, making them amenable to human genetic disease modelling. In the second part of this talk I will describe the strategies we are using in zebrafish to model multiple genetic and age related human cardiovascular diseases including arrythmias, cardiomyopathy and valve disease.
Lawrence Hutchison: Patients suffering from Acute Coronary Syndrome are at increased risk of developing further thromboses. Alongside surgeries such as PCI and CABG, dual antiplatelet therapy plays a key role in treatment of the condition. However, with increasing effectiveness of later generations of P2Y12 inhibitors, the continued necessity for TP inhibition via aspirin has been called into question. I will discuss our ongoing work in the Mundell lab looking at intracellular crosstalk between P2Y12 and TP signalling axes, which suggests that the relationship between these two activatory GPCRs may be more intimate than previously realised.