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Research Overview
Amer has had more than 25 years of clinical and lab-based research experience. His goal over the past 12 years has been to translate stem cell and developmental biology into medical therapies.
“From mothers who blame themselves for their baby’s death from a random genetic heart abnormality to a husband who watched his wife then his two sons die one by one from pulmonary hypertension, it is not possible to witness these situations and not be affected, or indeed to realise that the work we do to understand disease and develop therapies is really important. This is what drives us to keep pushing, even when times get very tough.”
Identity Crisis to possible cure
As we grow from a single cell embryo into a foetus that single cell multiplies and the new cells formed begin to acquire specific identities such as becoming a skin cell, gut cell or heart cell. This process of acquiring a specific identity is called differentiation. It has to be a highly controlled process, or we might end up hearing with our eyes, smelling with our ears and seeing with our noses! It was thought that once cells acquire an identity, they tend to keep it. Recent work from our lab has shown that in pulmonary arterial hypertension, where there is raised blood pressure in the arteries in the lungs, our arterial cells are having an identity crisis(!) and this disease is being caused by these cells thinking they are something else! We have found a way to restore this identity and this could be a cure for the disease.
Connecting without borders
Therapy development requires collaboration and shared effort. The network will enable the collaborative environment to help develop ideas and therapies, so we can translate these to the clinic for the benefit of patients and their families.