Research
The Srivastava lab is focused on the gene networks that guide the development of the heart, seeking to understand how aberrations in these pathways can cause congenital heart disease, and how they can use this knowledge to generate new cardiac cells to repair heart damage.
One powerful approach they use is creating models of heart disease in a dish by reprogramming human cells from patients carrying mutations in cardiac developmental genes, editing them with CRISPR technology and analyzing changes at the single cell level. This has led them to discover perturbations in pivotal genetic pathways that contribute to disease, and identified the nodes that can be therapeutically targeted to restore heart cells to normal function.
Modeling human cardiovascular diseases using single-cell approaches in animal models and induced pluripotent stem cells from patients with genetically defined disease.
Investigating how combinations of human mutations or polymorphisms in cardiac developmental genes predispose to disease.
Identifying targetable signaling, transcriptional, and translational nodes that can be manipulated for regenerative medicine or other therapeutic approaches to directly reprogram non-myocytes into new cardiomyocytes for cardiac regeneration.