Using Human Stem Cells, Genomics, and AI to Solve Childhood Heart Disease

The American Australian Association announced a new initiative to foster collaboration between Australian and U.S. health researchers. The exchange between researchers based at Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) in Melbourne and Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco will support researchers to develop and share new technologies and techniques to accelerate life-saving therapies for children affected by heart disease.

This new collaboration between MCRI—Australia’s leading child health research institute and top three in the world—and Gladstone will bring the full might of stem cell medicine, genomics, big data, and AI to bear on childhood heart disease. Globally, 260,000 children die from heart disease every year. In the U.S., 40,000 babies are born with a heart defect annually, or one child every 15 minutes.

“This exciting new collaboration with Gladstone, supported by the American Australian Association funding, will make a real difference to children and their families,” says Professor Enzo Porrello, MCRI Director of Stem Cell Medicine. “Through our close clinical collaborators, I often meet families like Ebony Mallinson’s, whose children Amelia and Eli were both born with heart disease and who now face an uncertain future. The work we are doing right now has the potential to identify the root causes of heart disease in children like Amelia and Eli, with a view to developing new precision treatments that could eliminate the need for heart transplants.”

“We’re proud to collaborate with the team at MCRI and combine our expertise in stem cell biology and cardiac research to help children with heart conditions,” says Gladstone President Deepak Srivastava, MD. “This type of initiative perfectly aligns with our goal at Gladstone of using science to overcome disease.”

“I am so proud to have played a part in my family’s longstanding connection to the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, named in honour of Lachlan’s grandmother, Dame Elisabeth, who founded the institute in 1986,” says Sarah Murdoch, MCRI Global Ambassador. “Enzo and his team really pioneered the field when in 2017 they created the most complex 3D miniaturised models of human heart tissue in the world. They now create thousands of these beating heart tissues that accurately mimic the human heart in a dish every week, in order to perform these huge experiments at a scale not previously imagined. With this announcement, MCRI continues to expand its world-leading research into the biggest child health problems of our time, with heart disease being one of the most lethal.”

The announcement builds on MCRI’s existing research collaborations and partnerships with leading US organizations,  including Boston Children’s Hospital, St Jude’s Hospital, Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard, and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, as well as European organizations including Great Ormond Street London, Leiden, and Copenhagen Universities.

Recent examples of MCRI’s impact include being the first stem cell laboratories in the world to produce human blood stem cells from a patient’s own cells, potentially preventing the need for donor matched transplants. And Gladstone researchers are pioneers in open-source machine learning models that provide novel insights into the underlying biology of diseases, particularly developmental heart and brain disorders.

Source: Murdoch Children’s Research Institute