"Understanding arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy using human induced pluripotent stem cells"

Jared Churko, PhD

"Understanding arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy using human induced pluripotent stem cells"

Jared Churko, PhD, is an assistant professor at the University of Arizona within the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine. He received his PhD in anatomy and cell biology from Western University and trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University within the Cardiovascular Institute. His lab seeks to understand the mechanisms leading to heart disease by combining single cell transcriptomics, systems biology, stem cell biology, genetic engineering, and bioinformatics. Specifically, his lab utilizes human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC) to generate cardiac cell types and develops tools for precision and regenerative medicine. He is appointed as the director of the University of Arizona iPSC Core.

During his talk, he will discuss the current state in using hiPSCs for heart disease modelling. Specifically, his talk will describe his recent progress in generating hiPSCs from patients with arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy, performing a transcriptomic analysis of cardiomyocytes derived from patient specific iPSCs to identify disease specific mechanisms, and performing organoid and functional assays to model arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy in a dish.