Jeremy Purvis, PhD (Associate Professor) and Christoph Rau, PhD (Assistant Professor) received an Emerging Challenges in Biomedical Research (ECBR) award from UNC School of Medicine for their project titled “Identifying the role of local cell-type neighborhoods on catecholamine-induced focal necrosis”.
The goal of the study is to identify cardiac cellular neighborhoods, the ways in which cells in the heart are situated near one another and interact with one another and to determine how these neighborhoods are potentially affected by genetic variation and how their composition across the heart may explain the seemingly random focal necroses that are hallmarks of catecholamine-driven cardiac damage. To achieve this, the labs will leverage their combined expertise to perform high-resolution, single-molecule-based analyses of cell types and cellular interactions across the heart in both healthy and diseased myocardium (Aim 1), followed by an examination of how genetics affect cellular neighborhood composition (Aim 2).