Heart Disease
Our vision is to develop new treatments for children with cardiotoxic heart damage and cardiomyopathies.
The Heart Disease Team aims to develop new therapies for children with cardiotoxic heart damage and cardiomyopathies using stem cell technologies.
Our laboratory utilises pluripotent stem cells to create human models of disease as a platform for therapeutic development.
Our research pipeline spans the full spectrum from the clinic to the single cell, taking full advantage of the unique capacity of the multidisciplinary team at the Melbourne Children’s campus.
The Team are generating heart organoids from patient stem cells, which can be used to investigate genetic causes of childhood heart disease in patients, as well as to screen for drugs that damage or regenerate heart tissue.
More information
- Find out more about our research pipeline on the Cardioregen website
- Visit our Heart Regeneration page
- Learn more about our Melbourne Children’s collaborations at the Heart Failure Flagship
- Visit our A-Z Child and Adolescent Health section for more information about Childhood Heart Disease
- Our group works closely with the Australian Cardio-Oncology Registry (ACOR)
- Learn more about our Stem Cell Medicine Strategic Initiative
- Our team collaborates with reNEW on several core projects
Our projects
Promoting cardioprotection in stem cell models of cardiotoxic heart damage from cancer patients
In addition to identifying pro-proliferative therapeutics, our established drug screening pipeline focuses on identifying novel compounds or repurposing existing drugs for cardioprotection in children with cancer who are treated with cardiotoxic chemotherapeutic agents.
Identifying new therapeutic avenues for cardiomyopathies
Our disease modelling and drug screening pipeline also focuses on identifying novel compounds or repurposing existing drugs to treat children with cardiomyopathies that culminate in heart failure.
Funding
- National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC)
- Australian Research Council (ARC)
- Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF)
- RCH Foundation
- HeartKids
- Heart Foundation
- reNEW
Collaborations
- Ben Parker, The University of Melbourne
- James Hudson, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute
- Paul Gregorevic, The University of Melbourne
- Igor Konstantinov, Royal Children's Hospital
- Michael Cheung, Royal Children's Hospital
- Robert Weintraub, Royal Children's Hospital
- Christian Brizard, Royal Children's Hospital
Featured publications
- *Anderson et al.…Elliott (2018). Nature Communications. NKX2-5 regulates human cardiomyogenesis via a HEY2-dependent transcriptional network.
- *Phelan et al.…Elliott (2016). European Heart Journal. ALPK3 deficient cardiomyocytes generated from patient derived iPSCs and mutant hESCs display abnormal calcium handling and establish that ALPK3 deficiency underlies familial cardiomyopathy.
- Mills et al. (2017). PNAS. Functional Screening in human cardiac organoids reveals a metabolic mechanism for cardiomyocyte cell cycle arrest.
- Mills et al. (2019). Cell Stem Cell. Functional Screening in human cardiac organoids reveals a metabolic mechanism for cardiomyocyte cell cycle arrest.
- *McOwan, TN… Elliott (2020) CardioOncology. Evaluating anthracycline cardiotoxicity associated single nucleotide polymorphisms in a paediatric cohort with early onset cardiomyopathy.