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DEPARTMENT OF ANATOMY AND CELL BIOLOGY SEMINAR SERIES

鈥�Perturbation of Wnt Signaling Pathways and Vascular Pathobiology鈥�

Dr. Marlene Rabinovitch
STANFORD UNIVERSITY

WEDNESDAY, MAY 25th
11:30AM 12:30PM
M1 LECTURE HALL

Dr. Marlene Rabinovitch is a Dwight and Vera Dunlevie Professor of聽 Pediatric Cardiology, and Research Director of the Vera Moulton Wall Center for Pulmonary Vascular Disease, at Stanford University School of Medicine. She is the 2010 recipient of the Louis and Artur Lucian Award for Research in Circulatory Diseases.

"Our research program has focused for three decades on trying to better
understand the mechanisms leading to pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) with the long-range view that we might better treat this devastating condition. We focused on understanding the link between the genetics and the cell pathobiology and discovered relationships between degradation of elastin by an endogenous elastase, loss of pre-capillary vessels, and proliferation of vascular cells in larger pre- and intra-acinar pulmonary arteries.

We showed that suppression of elastase activity could reverse experimentally-induced PAH. We recently discovered molecular pathways downstream of the gene that is mutant in familial PAH, i.e., bone morphogenetic protein receptor (BMPR)II that explain how activation of this receptor protects EC from apoptosis and resulting precapillary loss and also attenuates PA SMC proliferation in response to growth factors. Major work from our lab using human cells and genetically modified mice is eludicating interactions between BMPRII-PPARg mediated gene regulation and Wnt signaling.鈥�