Grant: Project Grant

Blood vessels in a healthy adult are stable and do not change very much. When diseases affect blood vessels, the cells that are contained in blood vessels can change. While most of these changes tend to be positive, and related to healing the damage, sometimes these changes can cause problems that make the disease worse. Our work is aimed at understanding how changes in the cells of blood vessels affect their function and to test novel ways of reducing the potential that these changes can problems. Overall, we are hopeful that our findings will allow us to develop new treatments for blood vessel diseases. We isolate blood vessels from patients undergoing bypass cardiac surgery. We isolate the individual types of cells that care present in these blood vessels and keep them alive in biological solutions in the laboratory. We use these cells to test our ideas. While several laboratories have thought about looking at the systems that we investigate, our work is unique because we think that these systems work in very specific sites within cells, not all over the place in cells. Our work will allow us to test this idea. If we are correct, we will be able to test the idea that using drugs that act at these specific sites, rather than everywhere in the cell, we will have fewer side-effects than are seen in drugs that target these events everywhere in the cell. These studies could identify new and better treatments for several heart and blood vessel diseases.