Research Associate

Applications are invited to join a dynamic team led by Prof Sanjay Sinha (https://www.sinha-lab.org/ and https://www.stemcells.cam.ac.uk/people/pi/sinha), to investigate coronary artery smooth muscle cell (SMC) development and its role in atherosclerosis using human stem cell-based models and state-of-the-art bioinformatics.

In the proposed project, we will explore the hypothesis that the metaplastic SMC response in atherosclerosis is a re-enactment of embryonic processes. That some SMCs in human coronary atherosclerosis de-differentiate to immature cells akin to embryonic precursor cells in the developing heart, which subsequently proliferate and re-differentiate to produce the mesenchymal cell types that build the atherosclerotic plaque. To test this idea, we have partnered with Prof Jacob Bentzon’s group (Univ of Aarhus, Denmark) who specialises in atherosclerosis and the PDRA will work closely with the Bentzon group towards the project aims.

The Sinha lab has extensive expertise on using pluripotent stem cell-based systems to generate cardiovascular cells (Cheung et al Nature Biotech 2012, Iyer et al Development 2015, Bargehr et al Nature Biotech 2019) and have recently generated a high resolution multi-omic atlas of the developing human heart (Bayraktar et al BioRxiv 2024 Cranley et al BioRxiv 2024). These approaches will be used to generate coronary SMCs in vitro and to understand how metaplastic differentiation may impact atherosclerosis development.