FOO LAB
Impactful scientific discoveries through world-class research
Epigenomics and regulation
The basic science of how gene regulation works keeps evolving as technologies sharpen. We adopt and exploit advances in technologies to push forward our understanding of regulation and heart biology and disease.
Personalized medicine
Cardiac Epigenomics
Personalized medicine, it's coming
Epigenomics
We found that as much as gene expression and epigenomic signals change in disease, they also vary from individual to individual.
Genetic variants
Cardiac traits are influenced by genetic variants. Phenotypic refinement and collecting genetic diversity is helping us to learn more about human heart failure pathways. We are exploring south-east Asian genetic backgrounds which are understudied and susceptible to disease.
Massively parralel reporter assays
We are implementing and adopting MPRA technologies and machine learning to help identify regulatory genetic variants that influence individual risk of heart failure and targetable human genes.
In future medicine and clinical practice should be optimized for each patient.
Dediffentiation
We are researching dedifferentiation as it applies to the heart.
Can reprogramming cardiomyocytes reverse aging? Or support cardiomyocyte function and heart repair in diseased states?
Transdifferentiation and dedifferentiation studies have got Foo Lab excited that functional epigenomics approaches might help us to fight heart failure one day soon.
haQTL, GWAS, epigenomes
Multiple labs including ours have shown that genetic variants influence expression of genes in the heart and related tissues and these variants influence disease risk
More work needs doing to go from these early clues to established pathways and treatments and interventions. For example GWAS variants need to be associated to enhancers or promoters, validated and those genes need characterizing to elucidate the role in disease.
