Thursday, December 01, 2016
I am pleased to announce the recruitment of Ethan Anderson, PhD to the FOEDRC. Dr. Anderson recently joined the Division of Pharmaceutics and Translational Therapeutics within the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Experimental Therapeutics as an Associate Professor in the University of Iowa College of Pharmacy. Dr. Anderson received his B.S. from the University of Minnesota and PhD from Yale University. Dr. Anderson’s research is focused on cardiac complications of diabetes, cardiac inflammation and fibrosis, and towards development of novel therapeutics and biomarkers of heart disease risk.
The primary research focus of Dr. Anderson’s laboratory is centered on the role of lipids and reactive oxygen species (ROS) in altering mitochondrial function, and in how the mitochondria uses these and other molecular intermediates to communicate with the rest of the cell, particularly the nucleus, in normal physiological states as well as disease. An increased understanding of these processes, coupled with improvements in mitochondrial-targeted pharmaceutical chemistry, will allow a new era to become realized where mitochondria are a viable therapeutic target in disease management.
Dr. Anderson’s team recently established a strong and dynamic collaboration with cardiac surgeons at East Carolina Heart Institute (ECHI), and this has allowed them to obtain human cardiac tissue biopsies from patients at time of surgery. Using a number of techniques to study mitochondrial function at the subcellular (i.e. organelle) and whole cell level in human heart tissue, they have recently uncovered a number of interesting mitochondrial abnormalities present in patients with type 2 diabetes. Anderson’s group was one of the first to show the existence of mitochondrial dysfunction in heart samples obtained from humans with diabetes in a landmark publication in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology in 2009. Dr. Anderson’s current research projects span clinical, translational and basic science research. His approach increases the likelihood of developing therapeutic strategies that will be able to enter human trials. Research in the Anderson lab is supported by Grants from the National Institutes of Health and the pharmaceutic industry.