Sudeshna Fisch

Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA

Dr. Fisch is the Associate Director of a high-value preclinical research core at Mass General Brigham and Harvard Medical School. Her collaborative research projects are highly published and are publicly visible on Harvard Catalyst profile. Her primary focus over the past decade has been to create an agile, data-driven, collaborative research model that primarily serves two goals – first, it brings in revenue dollars into her research facility and second, executes robust and reliable preclinical studies to help the R&D pipeline of her clients in academia and industry. She was formally trained as a cardiovascular fellow at Harvard on a broad combination of skills ranging from transcriptional biology to in vivo disease modeling including surgery and non-invasive technologies such as high-resolution ultrasound/imaging. Her stint as a scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in chemical biology on high throughput screening (HTS), large-scale protein purification and assay development led to a broad translational background in therapeutics discovery and drug development. Her PhD from Bowling Green State in Ohio was in the area of infectious disease. Her PhD thesis-Identification, Sequencing and characterization of Transhydrogenase, a mitochondrial protein essential for helminth infection of the rodent gut- focused on a classic animal model for a WHO classified tropical disease that afflicts millions of humans worldwide. Infectious disease and immunity have created a new area for recent collaboration, especially given the current pandemic.  The cardiovascular implications of SARS-COV-2 infection in the severely infected US population is profound and Dr. Fisch is using existing and novel murine models to study the effects of COVID on rodent heart by modulating genes relevant to cardiac function and by interrogating their nexus with inflammation and infection.

Katharina Schimmel

Stanford Cardiovascular Institute

In 2012, Dr. Katharina Schimmel received her MSc degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology with high honors at the Karl-Franzens-University Graz, Austria. There is currently no treatment for Troyer syndrome, a rare disease of spastic paraplegia. Therefore, together with the lab of Prof. Frank Madeo, a distinguished expert on aging and cell death, she aimed at filling the lack of knowledge on the pathogenesis of this disease. She found that replenishing the cellular protection by the protein spartin, which is lost in patients with Troyer Syndrome, might represent an attractive avenue for future therapeutic development. During her PhD studies from 2013 – 2017 in Medical School Hannover, Germany, she received throughout training by Prof. Thomas Thum. Diastolic heart failure represents an unmet medical need to date. Her work with him therefore aimed at the development of natural compounds and microRNA-based preventive and therapeutic approaches for cardiac fibrosis, leading to ameliorated diastolic performance of the heart. She discovered two nature derived substances as lead candidates for therapeutic applications in diastolic dysfunction and cardiac fibrosis in pre-clinical studies, which was published in Circulation. Intrigued by the opportunity to expand her expertise with cardiac regeneration research, she joined Prof. Ronglih Liao’s lab at Stanford Cardiovascular Institute in 2018. Dr. Katharina Schimmel’s work demonstrated detrimental effects of in utero exposure to cigarette smoke on cardiac regeneration in the offspring in mice. This was featured in the AHA News August 2019. In the year 2020, she became interested in diseases affecting the lung. She therefore joined Dr. Edda Spiekerkoetter’s lab at the Department of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine Stanford to address pathological changes in the endothelium in pulmonary-vascular conditions.