Palpant Group

Finding decision-making genes has implications for blocking a cell’s bad decisions when things go wrong in disease or in the environment.

Researchers have used human stem cells and single-cell sequencing to uncover the complex choreography of heart development

Welcome to the future.

Improving the success rate of heart transplants is among the goals of a University of Queensland researcher, 50 years after the first such surgery was performed in South Africa.

Dr Nathan Palpant studies human heart development using stem cells, to generate beating cardiac muscle cells in a dish. For this work, he received a UQ Foundation Research Excellence Award in recognition of the contribution he has made to an international effort to fight cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death globally. 

A research paper published in Nature journal overnight revealed that scientists had successfully edited the genomes of human embryos to prevent a mutation that causes hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, an inherited condition that causes sudden heart failure in young people.

Repairing damaged heart and vascular tissues will be the unique focus of a new University of Queensland research centre, established to combat cardiovascular disease. The UQ Centre for Cardiac and Vascular Biology (CCVB) brings together eight laboratories researching cardiovascular development, regeneration and disease.