Sean Wu Lab

Lab Overview

My research laboratory seeks to identify mechanisms responsible for human congenital heart disease, the most common cause of still-births in the U.S. and one of the major contributors to morbidity and mortality in infants and toddlers. We believe that by understanding the mechanisms regulating growth and differentiation of heart precursor cells during early embryonic development we can then apply these principles to understand the pathogenesis of adult onset heart diseases such as heart failure and arrhythmia where re-activation of early embryonic developmental program plays a central role. We currently use both genetically-modified mice as our living model to understand the biology of heart development as well as embryonic stem cells as a test-tube model to study the process of heart cell formation.

Recent News

March 19, 2021

Congratulations to former lab member Jan Buikema and post-doctoral fellow Soah Lee for publishing a detailed protocol of Wnt activation and cell contact inhibition-mediated hiPSC-CM expansion in the new Cell Press journal STAR Protocols.

March 1, 2021

Congratulations to Sharon Paige, an Instructor of Pediatric Cardiology at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital (LPCH) at Stanford, on her new position as the Associate Medical Director at Cytokinetics, Inc. We wish her great success in this new adventure. She will continue to see congenital heart disease patients in the cardiogenomics clinic at LPCH as a clinical adjunct faculty.

February 20, 2021

Congratulations to Julia Ryan for being accepted to George Washington School of Medicine where she will begin her medical career starting August, 2021.

February 4, 2021

Congratulations to former lab member Orlando Chirikian, Vahid Serpooshan, Elda Dzilic, Jan Buikema, Guang Li, and Aimee Beck and current lab members Will Goodyer, Soah Lee, Francisco Galdos, and Sharon Paige for their Scientific Reports paper describing the labeling of atrial and ventricular cardiomyocytes from in vitro differentiated hiPSCs using CRISPR/Cas9-based targeting of fluorescent reporter genes.

January 15, 2021

Congratulations to Drs. Sean Wu, Sharon Paige, Tahmina Samad for receiving the Additional Venture Research Fund for their study to identify metabolic biomarkers of heart failure in single ventricle patients. This 3 year award will allow them to recruit patients with single ventricle congenital heart disease from Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford and profile their metabolites in blood and urine for heart failure-specific metabolite.

January 12, 2021

Congratulations to Francisco Galdos, Sharon Paige, and former lab member Adrija Darsha on their protocol article in Methods in Molecular Biology describing the generation of fluorescent reporter lines to purify pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes.

January 6, 2021

Congratulations to lab members Han Zhu and Daniel Lee who along with colleagues in Stanford cardiology and internal medicine published a review article on the basic mechanism and clinical characteristics of immune checkpoint inhibitor cardiotoxicity in the journal Annual Reviews in Pharmacology and Toxicology.

November 10, 2020

Congratulations to Sruthi Mantri, 3rd year medical student at Stanford, for receiving the Dorothy Dee & Marjorie Dee Helene Boring Trust Award for Medical Students and also for being accepted to continue her research in the Stanford Medical School Medical Scholars Program.

November 1, 2020

Congratulations to post-doctoral fellow Han Zhu for receiving the highly prestigious Sarnoff Scholar Award for her research on single cell profiling of patients and mice with immune checkpoint inhibitor-mediated myocarditis.

October 20, 2020

Congratulations to Sharon Paige, Francisco Galdos, Soah Lee, Julia Ryan, Sidra Xu and former lab members Adrija Darsha and Aimee Beck on their Circulation paper describing the contractile defect in cardiomyocytes from multiple hypoplastic left heart syndrome patient-derived iPSC and the presence of metabolic handling defects.

September 15, 2020

Congratulations to Will Goodyer, an Instructor of Pediatric Cardiology at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford, for receiving the NIH/NHLBI K08 Mentored Clinical Scientist Development Award on his project to study the development of the cardiac conduction system.

July 2, 2020

Congratulations to former lab members Jan Buikema, Orlando Chirikian, Guang Li, Nazan Puluca, Benjamin Beyersdorf, James Hu, Aimee Beck, Sneha Venkatraman, Vahid Serpooshan and current members Soah Lee, Will Goodyer, Sharon Paige, Francisco Galdos for their seminal paper in Cell Stem Cell describing the activation of Wnt signaling and concurrent inhibition of cell-cell contact to induce, synergistically, the massive expansion of hiPSC-CMs for drug screen and tissue engineering applications.

July 1, 2020

Congratulations to former lab member Guang Li, currently an Assistant Professor of Developmental Biology at University of Pittsburgh, for his work in the Tabula Muris Consortium that recently published two papers in Nature describing the single cell transcriptomic atlas of ageing tissues in the mouse and organ-specific temporal signatures of ageing hallmarks.

June 1, 2020

Congratulations to former lab members Nazan Puluca and Markus Krane and current members Soah Lee and Francisco Galdos for their paper in Advanced Biosystems describing the use of a magnetically levitating microfluidic system to separate cardiomyocytes from neutral lipid storage disease patient-derived hiPSCs that exhibit increased intracellular lipid accumulation.

May 25, 2020

Congratulations to Zachary Sexton for successfully passing his Department of Bioengineering PhD qualifying examination. His PhD thesis will be focused on computational fluid dynamic analysis of vascular network with experimental validation of fluid dynamic properties of simulated vessel network generated by 3D bioprinting.

April 20, 2020

Congratulations to Han Zhu on her paper in Current Cardiology Reports describing the potential viral toxicities and host immune responses that may underlie cardiovascular complications in patients with COVID-19.