Biomedical Research
SVRF 2021 Awards Announcement
December 16, 2021
We are pleased to announce that we intend to award 17 grants in response to the 2021 Single Ventricle Research Fund (SVRF) request for proposals. Our flagship SVRF awards program supports bold and innovative research in SV and adjacent fields. Each year, we review the needs of the field and select a topic that is poised to create an outsized impact in the single ventricle research space. This year, we designed our SVRF 2021 program to address important gaps in our understanding of the mechanisms that drive development, growth, and repair of both healthy and single ventricle hearts.
We’re proud to present our selected SVRF 2021 awardees!
Our SVRF 2021 program focuses on identification and investigation of cardiac developmental pathways and mechanisms. Fundamental knowledge of heart development is foundational to our understanding of single ventricle disease etiology – and may catalyze development of predictive measures of disease, risk stratification tools, preventative non-therapeutic strategies, and therapeutic interventions to correct developmental abnormalities.
These awarded projects highlight 17 areas of important scientific discovery across the field, with topics including the impact of gene-environment interactions on the development of SV, the role of the placenta in heart development, and defining the developmental origin of pacemaker cells, as well as their response to injury. Teams supported by this award program have developed and embraced cutting edge technologies and techniques, such as 3D quantitative imaging and novel organoid derivations.
This selected cohort adds an outstanding 34 new investigators and co-investigators to the Additional Ventures single ventricle network and brings creative, cutting edge basic science to the research landscape.
With an investment of over $10.5M, we are proud to support this international, career stage- and gender-diverse group and to highlight the important work they’ll undertake as part of our community.
SVRF 2021 Award Recipients
| Primary Investigator | Project Title | Institution |
|---|---|---|
| Alessandro Bertero, PhD | Transcriptional and morphogenetic signatures of congenital heart disease pathways | University of Turin |
| Jonathan Butcher, PhD | Collective Neighborhood Signaling Driving Ventricular Growth, Maturation, and Pathogenesis | Cornell University |
| Neil Chi, MD, PhD | Mechanisms of Left Ventricle Heart Development | University of California, San Diego |
| Nicole Dubois, PhD | Mechanisms of Early Ventricular Lineage Specification | Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai |
| Jesse Engreitz, PhD | A reference map of enhancers during human fetal heart development to understand the genetic etiology of single ventricle diseases | Stanford University |
| Muge Kuyumcu-Martinez, PhD | Defining cell-type specific roles of RBfox2 in cardiovascular development | University of Texas Medical Branch |
| Jennifer Kwong, PhD | Mitochondrial citrate transport: A novel, potentially druggable link to hypoplastic right heart syndrome | Emory University School of Medicine |
| Andrew Landstrom, MD, PhD | Leveraging induced pluripotent stem cells to define the developmental drivers of hypoplastic left heart syndrome | Duke University School of Medicine |
| Stephanie Lindsey, PhD | Mechanobiological mechanisms of cardiac morphogenesis | University of California, San Diego |
| James Martin, MD, PhD | Hippo/YAP signaling and genetic networks of HLHS | Baylor College of Medicine |
| Lisa Maves, PhD | Defining Novel Roles for Proteasome Factors in Heart Development | Seattle Children’s Research Institute |
| Sigolène Meilhac, PhD | Embryological origin of functional single ventricles in the heterotaxy syndrome | Institut Pasteur and Université de Paris |
| Christian Mosimann, PhD | Gene-regulatory impact of Wnt signaling in ventricle formation | University of Colorado School of Medicine, Anschutz Medical Campus |
| William Pu, MD | Modeling human heart morphogenesis and congenital heart disease with bioreactor-derived cardiac organoids | Boston Children’s Hospital |
| Jian Shu, PhD | Spatiotemporal decoding of the placenta-heart axis through single-cell multi-omics and spatial genomics | Massachusetts General Hospital |
| Duncan Sparrow, PhD | Gene-environment interactions and single ventricle congenital heart disease | University of Oxford |
| Vasanth Vedantham, MD, PhD | Origin of Cardiac Pacemaker Cells | University of California, San Francisco |
Previous SVRF Cycles
The first annual SVRF 2020 program funded 17 outstanding research teams with projects focused on non-invasive interventions and biomarkers and an emphasis on multi-disciplinary approaches. Click here to read more about all our funded studies.