Kory Lavine, MD, PhD, the Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Professor of Cardiology and a professor of medicine at WashU Medicine, has received a $600,000 grant from the Additional Ventures Foundation — an organization that funds research into congenital heart disease — to study hypoplastic left heart syndrome. Lavine will lead the project and work with collaborators at the University of Colorado and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Children with this condition are born with a single ventricle in the heart rather than two, causing mixing of oxygenated and de-oxygenated blood and resulting in too little oxygen delivered to the body. Single ventricle congenital heart disease is a leading cause of pediatric heart failure.
Surgery to correct the disorder reroutes blood flow so it no longer mixes, but the heart continues to have a single ventricle. Some patients can live for decades with this fix. But for unknown reasons, in about 60% of patients, the single ventricle fails over time, requiring a heart transplant. The grant will fund studies of heart tissue from both types of patients and use cutting-edge single-cell sequencing techniques to understand the differences between the two. The goal is to identify molecular pathways and possible therapies that encourage long-term resilience of the single ventricle for all patients.
