A Woman is Not a Small Man: Sex Differences in the Heart
Leslie Leinwand, PhD
Chief Scientific Officer, BioFrontiers Institute
Distinguished Professor,
Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology
University of Colorado, Boulder
Abstract: Even though cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the number one killer of women in the U.S., women have traditionally been omitted from clinical trials and female animals have either not been included in preclinical research studies or, even worse, data from the two sexes have been combined. It is now becoming clear that we need a better understanding of sex differences in the development, presentation and outcome of CVD in humans as well as in animal models. We analyzed contractility in the whole heart, adult rat ventricular myocytes (ARVMs) and myofibrils from both sexes and observed functional sex differences at each level. We identified ~600 genes whose expression was sexually dimorphic in male and female cardiac myocytes. We also probed the activity of numerous signaling pathways and identified sex-specific activity differences. In addition to these differences at baseline, there are known differences in pathogenesis and outcomes in CVD, including fibrotic responses. We have begun to identify the mechanisms responsible for these baseline and disease processes and this talk will explore the role of substrate stiffness in cardiac myocyte and cardiac fibroblast biology.
BIO: Leslie Leinwand, PhD is a Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology (MCDB) Distinguished Professor and the Chief Scientific Officer of the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder. She was recruited to be Chair of MCDB in 1995. She received her Bachelor’s degree from Cornell University, her PhD from Yale University and did post-doctoral training at Rockefeller University. She joined the faculty at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York in 1981 and remained there until moving to Colorado in 1995. She cofounded Myogen, Inc. which was sold to Gilead Pharmaceuticals. More recently, she was a co-founder of Hiberna, Inc, and of MyoKardia, Inc. a company founded to develop therapeutics for inherited cardiomyopathies. She is a Fellow of the AAAS, former MERIT Awardee of the NIH, Established Investigator of the American Heart Association and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy for Inventors. She has been honored by the American Heart Association with its Distinguished Scientist Award. The interests of Dr. Leinwand’s laboratory are the genetics and molecular physiology of inherited diseases of the heart and how gender and diet modify the heart. The study of these diseases has required multidisciplinary approaches, involving molecular biology, mouse genetics, mouse cardiac physiology, and the analysis of human tissues.
