The Medicine by Design Global Speaker Series invites established and emerging international leaders in regenerative medicine to engage with our extraordinary community of researchers and clinicians.
Medicine by Design is pleased to welcome, Glen Tibbits, PhD, Distinguished Professor at Simon Fraser University and Co-Director of the Cellular and Regenerative Medicine Centre at the BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute.
Talk title: Investigating inherited arrhythmias, and cardiomyopathies using hiPSC-derived cardiomyocytes
This event will be held virtually only via Zoom.
About Glen Tibbits
After completing his Bachelor’s degree at McGill University, Glen subsequently pursued graduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. During his graduate studies at UCLA, Glen developed a profound curiosity about the electrical and contractile properties of the heart while completing his MSc and PhD at the Brain Research Institute. With an American Heart Association Post-Doctoral Fellowship (PDF), he studied cardiac pharmacology in Niigata, Japan in year one and cardiac biophysics at the UCLA School of Medicine in year two. He subsequently was appointed an Assistant Research Professor of Pediatric Cardiology at UCLA and then moved to Seattle, WA to become an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington. When a faculty position opened at Simon Fraser University, he chose to return to Canada after an absence of 15 years. At SFU he was appointed a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Molecular Cardiac Physiology from 2004-2018. The latter allowed him to start building a research program incorporating the use of human induced pluripotent stem cells differentiated into cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CMs) to understand better inherited cardiac arrhythmias and cardiomyopathies, more than a decade ago. In June 2024, he was awarded a Distinguished Professorship at SFU. He is currently the Co-director of the Cellular and Regenerative Medicine Centre (CRMC) at the BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute which is a state-of-the-art facility for generating and phenotyping hiPSC-derived cardiomyocytes and pancreatic β cells.
Talk abstract
As Co-Director of the Cellular and Regenerative Medicine Centre (CRMC) at the BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute (BCCHR), we have been very fortunate to have the resources to build a state-of-the-art facility dedicated to the use of human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSCCMs) to study cardiac diseases. While it is well established that a hiPSC-CM model offers distinct advantages in modeling cardiac disease and developing new therapies, there can be limitations. The first part of this talk will address how the CRMC uses technology to overcome some of these disadvantages. The talk will then focus on using hiPSC-CM models to investigate inherited cardiac arrhythmias that can lead to sudden cardiac arrest (SCA). Genetic variants in cardiac ion channels can cause channel dysfunction or channelopathies, and hiPSC-CM models have been insightful in investigating the mechanisms of these diseases. However, the leading known cause of sudden cardiac arrest in youth and elite athletes is hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) which is generally caused by genetic variants of sarcomeric proteins such as the myosin heavy chain and the troponin complex. Exploring the mechanisms of these diseases and discovering improved therapeutics using hiPSC-CMs will be an important focus of the talk.