Campbell Receives Single Ventricle Research Fund Award

Biomedical engineering professor Stuart Campbell has received the Single Ventricle Research Fund (SVRF) Award from the nonprofit foundation Additional Ventures for his proposal, "Discovering Biomechanical Phenotypes Caused by CHD-linked Gene Mutations."

The SVRF is an annual research award program that is solely focused on accelerating research and improving care for those with single ventricle heart defects through multi-year, high-impact grants. The SVRF grants awards annually to support research projects over up to three-year periods, and provides up to $600,000 in direct costs.

Campbell's research currently focuses on understanding the mechanisms that underlie genetic forms of heart disease. His laboratory uses both computational and experimental biomechanics approaches to improve quantitative understanding of these diseases and evolve new therapies. On the computational side, Campbell has developed novel multi-scale models of the heart that integrate genomic, functional, and anatomical data to predict behavior of the intact organ. The quantitative genotype-phenotype relationships represented in these models are then used to generate testable hypotheses that drive experiments. His laboratory is also developing instrumentation to perform high-throughput functional measurements of individual cardiac cells, allowing spatially varying properties within the heart to be more accurately characterized and incorporated into multi-scale models.

"These projects are poised to have a considerable impact on our understanding of single ventricle and on current and future care paradigms," Additional Ventures said in a release when announcing the winners. "This research will contribute to new understanding of cardiac development and the mechanisms that underlie single ventricle, generate novel models and systems by which to test new interventions and therapeutic candidates, and produce resources and approaches to fuel innovative ideas."