Author: sfchang

Wende appointed to new UCEM T32 leadership role

08/17/2023

Adam Wende, Ph.D., UCEM Scientist and co-leader of UCEM Pre-Clinical Research Team has been appointed as the Associate Director of the UCEM T32 Interdisciplinary Training in Pathobiology and Rehabilitation Medicine Program.
The goal of the training program is to develop burgeoning pre- and post-doctoral candidates into future leaders in translational rehabilitation research—scientists who are equipped to test and disseminate novel rehabilitative strategies that will alleviate impairment and compromised life quality in the face of chronic disease management.

Wende Awarded R01 to Investigate PDK2 in Heart Failure

Date: Mar. 9th 2023

Wende was awarded an R01 from NHLBI of the NIH entitled, “Novel roles of PDK2 in heart failure: Regulation of mitochondrial nuclear crosstalk via metabolic regulation and histone acetylation” (1R01HL167872-01). A brief introduction to the project: Cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of mortality in the United States, with different etiologies of heart failure associated with distinct changes in mitochondrial substrate selection, utilization, and gene expression mediating these differences. Here we test the hypothesis that one family of kinases that regulate this process (i.e., PDKs) play distinct roles in mortality, cardiac hypertrophy, mitochondrial oxidative metabolism, and signaling to transcriptional pathways in the nucleus mediated by epigenetics (i.e., histone acetylation). We have developed new animal model systems of inducible and cardiomyocyte specific loss-of-function mice of the two cardiac enriched isoforms of this pathway (i.e., PDK2 and PDK4) to determine the mechanism of this regulation and test the potential of their isoform-specific impact on pressure-overload induced heart failure.