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Cardiovascular Biology Research Program

Courtney Griffin, Ph.D. Assistant Member, Cardiovascular Biology Research Program Program

Research Interests
My lab is fundamentally interested in how blood vessels are made. In the adult, new vessel formation can be beneficial (e.g., during wound healing or ischemia) or detrimental (e.g., during tumor growth and diabetic retinopathy). Our goal, therefore, is to define genetic and molecular pathways that can lead to novel therapies promoting insufficient vascular growth or disabling pathogenic vascular growth.

Because many of the processes that occur during vascular development in the embryo are recapitulated when new blood vessels are formed in the adult, we use both embryonic and adult mouse models to study vascular development. We are currently utilizing mice with mutations in chromatin-remodeling enzymes to approach the field of vascular development from a unique perspective. Chromatin-remodeling enzymes are the catalytic subunits of multi-protein complexes that physically interact with regulatory elements of certain target genes throughout the genome. These complexes mediate transcriptional activation or repression of their target genes by manipulating the local chromatin structure so that large transcriptional machinery can gain access to the target gene promoter. We have demonstrated that at least one chromatin-remodeling enzyme plays an important role in embryonic vascular development, and we are systematically depleting the other major enzymes to determine their participation in vascular development. We are also interested in the function of these enzymes and complexes in the adult vasculature and will assess their role during both normal and pathological vascular growth. Finally, we are exploiting the physical interaction between chromatin remodeling complexes and their target genes to identify genes specifically involved in embryonic and adult vascular development. We anticipate that these complexes will elucidate the epigenetic control of genes already known to play important roles in vascular development and will reveal novel genes not previously recognized as mediators of vascular development.

Joined OMRF Scientific Staff in 2008.

Mailing Address
Cardiovascular Biology Research Program, MS 45
Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation
825 N.E. 13th Street
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73104

Contact Information
Phone: (405) 271-7073
Fax: (405) 271-7417
E-mail: Courtney-Griffin@omrf.org