Stefano Morotti
University of California-Davis, CA·Physiology
Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) is a form of heart failure in which the heart still pumps out a normal share of its blood with each beat but does not work properly. It affects more than three million Americans, and it is becoming more common as people age and as obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure spread.
- Fields
Physiology
Biomedical Engineering
Pharmacology
- Topics
heart failure with preserved ejection fraction
HFpEF
cardiac arrhythmia
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2029
What they work on
- 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.
- Build a refined platform of mathematical models of heart cells and tissue that makes testable predictions about HFpEF contractile dysfunction and ventricular arrhythmias.
- Use mechanistic modeling and data-driven precision medicine methods to study how differences between HFpEF subphenotypes, including sex differences, affect disease mechanisms and response to therapy.
- Translate findings across species with the models to identify druggable targets and predict implications for treating different subgroups of human HFpEF patients.
More about the research
Almost every drug that helps the better-understood form of heart failure fails in HFpEF, which suggests different disease mechanisms. Patients also vary widely, partly by sex: HFpEF is more common in women, who have worse symptoms but lower death rates than men. This project asks whether HFpEF is really several subtypes that may each need their own treatment.
Why it matters
People with HFpEF have few effective treatments and poor survival after their first hospital stay. By identifying the molecular and cellular changes behind weak contraction and lethal arrhythmias in different HFpEF subtypes, this work could point to druggable targets and help match therapies to specific groups of patients, including accounting for differences between women and men.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Tammy Kindel
Medical College of Wisconsin, WI·Medicine & Clinical Research
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.
Thomas Vondriska
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Physiology
Map gene activity, chromatin accessibility and histone modifications in heart, kidney and liver of ZSF1 rats as HFpEF develops, building the first multi-organ epigenomic atlases of the disease.
Oguz Akbilgic
Wake Forest University, NC·Medicine & Clinical Research
Develop an AI model that predicts future heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) from ECG data, using carefully verified data from NIH-funded studies.
The school
University of California-Davis: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 647 research doctorates a year.
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