Nassal receives AHA Postdoctoral Fellowship

Drew Nassal, a postdoc in the research lab of  Dr. Thomas Hund, professor, Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Internal Medicine and associate director of the Davis Heart and Lung Research Institute, was recently awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the American Heart Association (AHA). Drew received his Ph.D. in Physiology and Biophysics from Case Western Reserve University in 2017 (Ph.D. advisor: Isabelle Deschenes), after which he joined the Hund lab for his postdoc. 

His project is entitled "Mechanisms of betaIV-spectrin degradation and its role in myocardial infarction remodeling." Summary: Cardiovascular disease is the single leading cause of death worldwide with greater than a third of those deaths attributed to myocardial infarction (MI). Numerous pathways ranging from fibrosis, inflammation, cell death, contraction defects, and electrical excitation contribute to declining cardiac performance, limiting the efficacy of existing therapies.  Here, we attempt to address this challenge by identifying the disruption of the cytoskeletal protein BIV-spectrin following cardiac stress. This protein is unique in that it complexes with a host of molecular targets involved in cardiovascular disease, suggesting that BIV-spectrin is situated to influence multiple disease pathways. By preserving BIV-spectrin expression following MI, we will investigate its potential to prevent clinically observed increases in fibrosis, inflammation, and arrhythmias.

The competitive two-year fellowship runs July 1, 2018 - June 30, 2020.