Dear Colleagues,

As Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Cardiovascular Development and Disease (JCDD), I am pleased to announce that the winner of the 2018 JCDD Travel Award (2nd period) is Dr. Colette A. Bichsel, a postdoctoral researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital, who will receive 500 Swiss Francs towards her travel expenses to attend the International Vascular Biology Meeting, held in Helsinki, Finland.

Dr. Bichsel’s current research focuses on cellular and biomimicking in vitro models to study capillary malformations. The major conclusion of Dr. Bichsel’s research presented in her abstract for this meeting is that they found that GNAQ-mutant endothelial cells in CM lesions are associated with LYVE1+/MRC1+ accessory cells.

Dear Colleagues,

As Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Cardiovascular Development and Disease (JCDD), I am pleased to announce that the winner of the 2018 JCDD Travel Award (First period), is Dr. Monika Gladka-de Vries, a Postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Eva van Rooij’s laboratory at Hubrecht Institute KNAW, Utrecht, the Netherlands, who will receive 500 Swiss Francs towards her travel expenses to attend the Heart Failure Winter Meeting 2018 to be held in Les Diablerets, Switzerland.

The major conclusion of Dr. Gladka’s research presented in her abstract for this meeting is that she used single-cell sequencing on both the healthy and diseased adult heart to study transcriptomic differences between cardiac cells, as well as cell type-specific changes in gene expression during cardiac disease.

We would like to thank all the applicants for participating and it was difficult to pick one winner given the diverse and high-quality selection of work submitted. For candidates who lost or missed the first period of the award, you are also welcome to apply for the second period Travel Award in 2018.

Prof. Dr. Andy Wessels

As Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Cardiovascular Development and Disease (JCDD), I am pleased to announce that the winner of the 2017 JCDD Travel Award, is Dr. Jae Gyun Oh, a Postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Roger J. Hajjar’s laboratory at Icahn School of Medicine at Mt Sinai, NY, USA, who will receive 800 Swiss Francs towards travel expenses to attend 2017 Keystone Symposia to be held in Keystone, CO, USA.
Dr. Oh’s current research focuses on the role of miR-146a as a SUMO1 targeting microRNA (miR). SUMO1 has been shown to be a critical player in heart failure (HF) pathophysiology. The expression of miR-146a shows an inverse correlation with SUMO1. In his project, Dr. Oh investigated which cell types contribute to miR-146a expression. He analyzed isolated myocyte and non-myocyte fractions from normal and failing hearts and determined that during HF, upregulation of miR-146a and downregulation of SUMO1 was confirmed in cardiomyocytes, but that the amount of pri-mir-146a indicating transcription of miR-146a was increased only in nonmyocytes.
He tested the hypothesis that cell-to-cell transfer of mature miR-146a can explain the increase in miR-146a in cardiomyocytes and found that miR-146a is mainly secreted from fibroblasts via exosomes and that these fibroblast exosomes are taken up by cardiomyocytes. The major conclusion of Dr. Oh’s research presented in his abstract for this meeting is that fibroblasts are a major source of miR-146a during HF, and exosome-mediated miR-146a transfer is a critical mechanism of cardiomyocyte function.