A very long collaboration that started as a side gig in my postdoc with Chi V Dang (at UPenn), and continued over a decade through my stint at Yale with Andre Levchenko, and then for years at UConn is finally out! It all started with the observation of a strange phenomenon while I was characterizing a vector Chi V Dang's lab had created. We found that a small number of cancer cells were not maintaining their HIF transcriptional activity at stable levels, and were cheating the other cells in hypoxia. There is much more to this story, so read along: (here is the link). The observation was made a while back, but it took a long time to fully work...

Collaborating with Junaid Afzal at UCSF, we created a platform that closely mimics the extracellular matrix in the heart, matching its mechanical and chemical properties to rapidly mature human cardiac constructs. https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(22)00955-X Congratulations to Yamin Liu, Wenqiang Du, Yasir Suhail, Visar Ajeti as well as our collaborators in Lixia Yue's lab (Pengyu Zong, Jianlin Feng), as well as Alix Deymier and Maya Yankova for their help. Cardiovascular safety is the number one cause for failure of preclinical drug development, and there is a long standing need to create human cardiac tissue models to test drugs for cardiotoxicity. Currently, the small animal heart models display vastly different biochemical, physiological, and genetic features from humans—making it difficult to replicate the human heart...