# Regulatory Mechanisms of Cardiomyocyte Lineage Specification

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO · 2021 · $310,000

## Abstract

Project Summary:
Adult heart disease including heart failure and atrial fibrillation are leading causes of morbidity and mortality in
the United States and developed world. Although human pluripotent stem cells or other cardiac progenitor
cells have great potential to treat these diseases, fully differentiating them into mature functional ventricular or
atrial cardiomyocytes for ventricular myocardial regenerative therapies to treat heart failure, for modeling
human ventricular and atrial cardiac diseases in a dish, or for therapeutic drug screening has remained a major
bottleneck in the biomedical field for realizing these possibilities. Thus, we propose to address this crucial
issue through discovering the cellular and molecular mechanisms that mediate the reprogramming of
cardiomyocytes into functional ventricular and atrial lineages. Toward this end, we will interrogate the gene
regulatory networks that control cardiomyocyte lineage specification during zebrafish cardiac reprogramming
and regeneration and then apply this knowledge to identify key cardiac reprogramming factors that guide the
differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells into ventricular and atrial cardiomyocytes. Overall, these
proposed myocardial reprogramming studies may provide new approaches to address the long-standing issue
of how to direct cells into functional ventricular and atrial cardiomyocytes for human cardiac disease modeling
and therapeutic screening in cell culture systems as well as for human cardiac regenerative therapies.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10067375
- **Project number:** 5R01HL139709-04
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO
- **Principal Investigator:** Neil C Chi
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $310,000
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2017-12-08 → 2022-11-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10067375

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10067375, Regulatory Mechanisms of Cardiomyocyte Lineage Specification (5R01HL139709-04). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10067375. Licensed CC0.

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