Team Stéphanie BARRÈRE-LEMAIRE – Matteo MANGONI

Cardiovascular disease, including myocardial infarction and heart rhythm disorders, remain the world’s leading cause of fatalities in 2024. With ageing of population, the World Health Organization forecasts these pathologies to remain the leading cause of mortality until 2030.

Cardiac performance depends on two parameters:
(i) the activity and regulation of the primary heart’s pacemaker centers controlling heart rate, and
(ii) the efficiency of myocardial contraction.

The team’s projects focus on studying the mechanisms involved in the control of cardiac pacemaker activity and in the mechanisms of cell death during myocardial infarction.

The team’s objectives are to develop cardioprotective strategies to normalize heart rate in cardiac disease and inhibit cardiac cell apoptosis, in order to prevent ventricular remodeling and progression to heart failure.

Strategy and techniques
the team uses genetic models of cardiac pathology, such as transgenic mice with brady- or tachyarrhythmia, as well as other rhythm disorders. For infarction, the surgical model of reversible coronary ligation is used to mimic the clinical context of reperfused myocardial infarction as closely as possible.

Our team develops an approach of integrated physiology from organ level to molecular and epigenetic regulatory pathways governing pacemaker activity and cell function. The team has set up all the techniques and models needed to study the pathophysiological mechanisms of cardiac automaticity, heart rhythm and function in pathophysiological models of heart disease.