Grant: Operating Grant

Cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death and disability in Ontario and Canada, results in an enormous loss of productivity to society and represents a growing burden on the health care system. With dramatic improvements in the treatment of the acute stages of heart disease, the health system now faces the challenge of escalating chronic cardiovascular disease, including systolic and diastolic heart failure, hypertensive and diabetic heart disease, stroke, and vascular atherosclerosis. Unfortunately, these conditions are often diagnosed at the presentation of symptoms, which occurs in the later stages of disease. Advances in treating and managing these debilitating conditions requires a shift from the traditional focus on end-stage complications towards the development of novel diagnostic, prognostic, and targeted therapeutic and preventive tools and strategies. This research proposal brings together an outstanding research team to build on the success of these previous studies involving mouse models of cardiac disease and to extend the approach to include human pluripotent stem cells as a cellular model of disease that can provide novel populations for the identification of new markers and can also be used to validate marker sets and to test the therapeutic potential of new markers. To accomplish this goal, we will combine our expertise in stem cell biology and differentiation, cardiac biology and disease and proteomics and bioinformatics to identify and mechanistically investigate novel cell-surface markers by advance mass spectrometry. We feel that this type of study will provide important data as we design the next generation of treatments for cardiac disease.