Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Heart muscle cells can respond to injury and divide in newborn humans, but as these cells get more mature, they lose the ability to regenerate. My research investigates the signals that instruct heart cells to mature, allowing them to gain the characteristics that make for a functioning adult heart but lose the ability to divide after an injury. My initial evidence suggests that hydrogen peroxide acts as a molecular switch, coordinating multiple signaling pathways to promote heart cell maturation. Discovering how this switch works will help us to understand how to promote regeneration and repair the injured heart.