Cardiology

Vinoj’s group researches on producing in vitro cardiac models from patient-derived human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) that would mimic in vivo disease phenotypes and is applying genome engineering to reverse phenotype-associated mechanisms.

Central to this is developing optogenetic strategies (based on dCas9 CRISPR technology) for modelling and modulating cell signal mechanisms in context of biology and disease at the cellular level. This has provided the impetus for understanding and modulating cardiac disease severity (for conditions like ARVC and Diabetic Cardiomyopathy), for influencing brain cancer cell behaviour (ependymoma) and for assessing/controlling drug response (pharmacogenetics and electrophysiology) in these cell models. Auxiliary to this is the development of 3D engineered models using optoelectronic biomaterials or bioprinted hydrogels to improve models and their applications for industrial or clinical translation.

The lab’s current focus has been to support genetic manipulation with functional translatable data for modelling cardiomyopathies using hiPSC-derived cardiomyocytes and is developing tools to advance this research through improved cardiomyocyte differentiation and maturation strategies, coupled with advanced genetic and bioengineering strategies.