New Grant Funds Study of Sex Hormones’ Impact on the Heart
April, 15, 2025 - Principal investigator: Pim Oomen, assistant professor of biomedical engineering
Award: $231,000 over three years
Funding agency: American Heart Association Career Development Award
Project: Sex Hormone-Driven Cardiac Remodeling: Gaining Mechanistic and Therapeutic Insights through Biophysics Modeling
Women’s and men’s hearts are not just different in size, they also respond differently to diseases and treatments. This is partly because of the sex hormones estradiol and testosterone, which play powerful roles in shaping how the heart grows and functions. Despite knowing this, researchers still do not fully understand how these hormones work in the heart or how to use this knowledge to improve treatments. With this project, Oomen wants to uncover exactly how these hormones affect the heart and use this information to design better, more personalized therapies for heart disease.
Specifically, Oomen plans to develop advanced computer models to simulate how sex hormones impact the heart. These models will help researchers understand how hormones affect heart cell growth and strength, and how men and women respond differently to drugs. By combining what he learns about heart cells with models of the whole heart, he will be able to better predict how common heart medications work for men and women.
More information: https://professional.heart.org/en/research-programs/aha-funding-opportunities/career-development-award
