Boaz Goldberg presents at the 2023 CVI Early Career Symposium

Stanford Cardiovascular Institute summer fellow Boaz Goldberg presented a poster detailing his research at the CVI Early Career Symposium on August 9, 2023. His work, Delineating molecular drivers of fibrosis in cardiomyopathies, focused on the cardiac fibrosis characteristic of heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States. His reseach expanded on recent findings by the Blau lab showing that elevated expression of 15-PGDH contributes to muscle atrophy and the progression of fibrosis in dilated cardiomypathy. To investigate the molecular regulators of 15-PGDH expression, he identified the specific chromatin regions which surround the 15-PGDH gene and, using BPNet, a neural network trained to de-noise chromatin accessibility data, he identified putative regulatory proteins that drive 15-PGDH expression. With the help of gene reporter expression assays, he assisted in validating the role of these putative regulators as drivers of 15-PGDH expression, and assessed their role in cardiac fibrosis.