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Professor Mark Kahn

Professor Mark Khan

Professor Mark Kahn (University of Pennsylvania)

3 July 2015

12.00 noon

GLT3, Medical School Building

Professor Sudhesh Kumar, Dean of Warwick Medical School, is delighted to welcome Professor Mark Kahn to give the first Dean's Distinuguished Lecture.

Using development to understand cardiovascular disease

My lab studies signaling pathways that cause human cardiovascular disease using mouse and fish developmental systems.

Cerebral cavernous malformations (CCMs) are a common vascular malformation that is a major cause of stroke and neurologic disability in young people. Positional cloning studies identified three genes that encode adaptor proteins as CCM disease genes in human patients more than a decade ago, but how mutations in these genes results in CCM disease has remained mysterious.

We have analyzed the CCM pathway in the developing heart and vessels of mice and fish and found that CCM signaling inhibits the MEKK3 signaling pathway to control endothelial gene expression during cardiovascular development. We are presently testing whether regulation of MEKK3 function and the gene expression changes in the developing heart also play important roles in CCM disease in the brain.