Tammy Kindel
Medical College of Wisconsin, WI·Medicine & Clinical Research
Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) is a form of heart failure closely tied to obesity. In HFpEF, the heart pumps normally but stiffens and does not relax and refill well between beats.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Physiology
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
heart failure with preserved ejection fraction
HFpEF
diastolic dysfunction
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Test whether the gut microbiome after sleeve gastrectomy raises blood bile acids that activate FXR, a bile-acid sensor, using fecal transfer from operated mice and metagenomic sequencing of rodent and human stool.
- Determine whether plasma from sleeve gastrectomy subjects reduces metabolic stress in heart muscle cells via FXR, using human and rodent cardiomyocyte lines engineered for controllable FXR expression.
- Test whether sleeve gastrectomy improves heart relaxation through FXR signaling in heart muscle by operating on mice lacking FXR only in cardiomyocytes and measuring cardiac function.
More about the research
This relaxation problem is called diastolic dysfunction, and no treatment is known to lower deaths from HFpEF. Sleeve gastrectomy (SG), a bariatric (weight-loss) surgery that removes part of the stomach, improves diastolic function. Weight loss from dieting does not. This suggests the surgery's rewiring of the digestive tract triggers its own heart-helping mechanism.
Why it matters
People with obesity-related HFpEF have no therapy proven to reduce cardiovascular death. If gut microbe–derived bile acids acting through FXR explain why sleeve gastrectomy helps the heart, that pathway could become a target. Drugs or other non-surgical treatments could then copy the surgery's benefit, and surgical approaches could also be refined, for patients with obesity-associated heart failure.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Frank Duca
University of Minnesota, MN·Physiology
Assess whether glyphosate exposure at different developmental timepoints promotes obesity or impaired glucose control in male and female mice fed a chow or high-fat diet.
Stefano Morotti
University of California-Davis, CA·Physiology
Identify key molecular and cellular changes in excitation-contraction coupling, the link between electrical signals and heartbeats, in a mouse model of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), using functional and transcriptomic data.
D Foster
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Physiology
Identify the enzymes that convert vitamin A to retinoic acid in adult heart muscle cells, starting from DHRS4, using heart muscle cells and engineered heart tissue grown from human stem cells.
The school
Medical College of Wisconsin: 17 labs on PI Pages, $360M a year on research, 44 research doctorates a year.
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