Metabolic derangements, including obesity and diabetes, are today the leading contributors to cardiovascular disease in the US and worldwide. More than a third of all Americans are obese, and one in ten have diabetes. The Cardiovascular Metabolism Program at the University of Pennsylvania, bridging the Institute of Diabetes, Obesity, and Metabolism (IDOM) and the Cardiovascular Institute (CVI), aims to fundamentally advance our understanding of the relationship between metabolic disease and cardiovascular disease.

Members of the program are taking a wide variety of approaches, including human genetics, human physiology studies, iPSC and murine genetic engineering, and state-of-the-art metabolomics, to address fundamental and mechanistic questions in lipid biology, vascular disease, insulin resistance, and other processes critically involved at the interface between metabolic and cardiovascular disease.

The aims of the program are two:

  1. To unravel molecular mechanisms by which metabolic derangements lead to cardiovascular disease (and vice versa), and;

  2. To leverage these discoveries to develop novel diagnostic biomarkers and therapeutic targets to treat these devastating afflictions.

Collaborative efforts between the Penn Cardiovascular Institute, Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute, and the Institute for Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism have led to the newly launched Metabolomics Core in the Penn Cardiovascular Institute. This Core provides state-of-the-art quantitative targeted metabolomics, with global metabolomics in the future, to the entire Penn research community.

 

Complications Unit Members

 

Zoltan Arany

Zoltan Arany, M.D., Ph.D.
Co-Director
Complications Unit
Director, Cardiovascular Metabolism Program