The Whitaker Cardiovascular Institute of Boston University Medical Campus (BUMC) was established in 1974 to foster advances in research, treatment, and education in the broad area of heart and vascular disease. The Institute provides a unified structure that combines and integrates the components of basic science, clinical investigation, medical education, patient care, health-policy planning, and community research.
Over the past half century, some of the Medical Center’s most distinguished research advances have been in the areas of hypertension, vascular disease, lipid metabolism, heart failure, and atherosclerosis.
In the past three decades, the Whitaker Cardiovascular Institute has been singled out by the National Institutes of Health’s Heart, Lung and Blood Institute as a Specialized Center of Research in Hypertension, and as a Specialized Center of Research in Ischemic Heart Disease. The Specialized Center designation indicates that the Institute serves as a site for important medical research in the national interest. In addition, it was recently designated a Center for Cardiovascular Proteomics through support from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
Dr. Jessica Fetterman of WCVI's Vascular Biology group is a deserving recipient of the first annual DEIA Pilot Grant. The Department of Medicine launched its inaugural Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) Pilot Grant program this year, supporting innovative projects led by interdisciplinary teams of faculty, trainees, and staff. Proposals focused on improving clinical care, education, workforce […]
Congratulations to Dr. Noyan Gokce and co-PI J. Schlezinger for earning this grant, which was awarded for their proposal to investigate environmental pollutants detrimental to the cardiovascular system. Read on for Dr. Gokce's summary of the project: Environmental pollutants that have contaminated our food supplies and consumer products, some termed “forever chemicals”, can bio-accumulate […]
WCVI member Dr. Jessica Fetterman, PhD, FAHA, Assistant Professor of Medicine, has been selected for the Smith Family Foundation's Odyssey Award! Created in 2017 to fuel creativity and innovation in junior investigators in the basic sciences, the Odyssey Award supports the pursuit of high impact ideas to generate breakthroughs and drive new directions in biomedical […]
We are pleased to announce an NIH grant has been awarded to support Dr. Ivan Luptak's research on hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). This project aims to explore interventions to improve mitochondrial function and energy balance in HCM, potentially delaying or reversing the progression of this condition to heart failure. Using innovative imaging and spectroscopy techniques, the […]
Congratulations to Whitaker Cardiovascular Institute DoM Evans Day award winners!! Outstanding Citizenship Award- Frederick Ruberg, MD Junior Faculty Mentoring Award- Deepa Gopal, MD, MS Clinical Oral Presentation Winner- Ross Okazaki
Dr. Jiang and his group reported recently that neutrophil elastase (NE), a protease secreted from neutrophils, regulates vascular endothelial cell permeability. NE cleaves and activates protease-activated receptor-2, leading to actomyosin cytoskeletal activation, cell junction molecule VE-cadherin degradation, and increased endothelial permeability. Inhibition and deletion of NE in mice protect obesogenic diet-induced vascular leakage and immune […]
Vijaya Kolachalama, PhD, BUSM, Medicine/Computational Biomedicine, is a founding member of BU’s Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences and affiliated with the department of computer science. Research interests of his group currently lie at the interface of machine vision, representation learning and domain generalization. His laboratory has spent a significant amount of time to develop […]
Francesca Seta, PhD, BUSM, Medicine/Vascular Biology, focuses on the biology of vascular smooth muscle and its contribution to maladaptive vascular remodeling associated with arterial stiffness and aortic aneurysms/dissections, two vascular conditions with no current therapies. She has identified novel vascular smooth muscle-specific molecular mechanisms, which could be targeted therapeutically to prevent vascular diseases and established […]