Laura Hansen
Emory University, GA·Physiology
Peripheral artery disease (PAD) narrows the arteries to the limbs, usually the legs, with fatty plaques. Poor blood flow causes pain, reduced mobility, wounds that won't heal and sometimes amputation.
- Fields
Physiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biology
- Topics
peripheral artery disease
peripheral arterial disease
atherosclerosis
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2027
What they work on
- Test whether muscle satellite cells are required for exercise-driven recovery of blood flow, using a mouse exercise preconditioning model in which satellite cells are selectively ablated.
- Use single-cell sequencing to map differences among satellite cells after exercise and identify which stimuli and gene expression profiles most strongly promote blood vessel growth.
- Measure gene expression changes and variation in satellite cells isolated from PAD patients before and after supervised exercise therapy, and relate these to how much each patient improves.
More about the research
Supervised exercise therapy is one of the most effective and least invasive treatments. Yet no one knows exactly how it helps, which makes it hard to design the best exercise program. This project tests whether satellite cells, the stem cells of skeletal muscle, are key to how exercise helps.
Why it matters
People with peripheral artery disease face pain, limited mobility and risk of amputation. Supervised exercise helps many of them, but how it works is unclear. Learning how muscle satellite cells respond to exercise could lead to more effective exercise programs and new therapies. It could also help explain why some patients benefit more than others.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Robert Wirka
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Genetics
Track individual smooth muscle cells as they multiply and choose fates during atherosclerosis, using a barcoding mouse model compatible with single-cell RNA sequencing, with and without Twist1 knockout.
Yujun Cai
Yale University, CT·Pharmacology
Investigate how PDE10A drives vascular smooth muscle cells exposed to high phosphate to turn into bone-like cells and calcify, using PDE10A knockdown and inhibition in cultured cells and PDE10A-deficient animals.
Albert Sinusas
Yale University, CT·Medicine & Clinical Research
Develop a multimodality imaging approach that uses early bright regions on non-contrast CT to guide hydrogel injection through the chest wall into injured heart muscle, in a pig model of reperfused heart attack.
The school
Emory University: 70 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 286 research doctorates a year.
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