Summary
Sian Harding is Professor of Cardiac Pharmacology at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, and a co-investigator within the UKRMP Immunomodulation Hub.
She obtained her Ph.D. in Pharmacology from King's College, London in 1981, and since then the primary focus of her work has been cardiomyocyte function in the failing heart. This has extended to gene therapy to modulate cardiomyocyte function, and she is Scientific PI for the UK's first clinical trial on myocardial gene therapy. More recently the scope has extended to the characterisation of cardiomyocytes derived from embryonic stem cells, and their use in cardiac repair, tissue engineering and drug discovery.
Professor Harding is Past-President of the European Section of the International Society for Heart Research and Fellow of the AHA, ESC and ISHR. She sits on the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and the Scientific Advisory Board of the PPP "Stem Cells for Safer Medicines".
Professor Harding delivered her Inaugural Lecture, entitled 'Reviving the Failing Heart: one cell at a time', on 3 April 2007. The abstract and other details of the lecture can be found here.
Publications
Journals
Schneider M, Golforoush P, Narasimhan P, et al., 2020, Selective protection of human cardiomyocytes from anthracycline cardiotoxicity by small molecule inhibitors of MAP4K4, Scientific Reports, Vol:10, ISSN:2045-2322, Pages:1-12
Lyon A, Babalis D, Morley-Smith AC, et al., 2020, Investigation of the safety and feasibility of AAV1/SERCA2a gene transfer in patients with chronic heart failure supported with a left ventricular assist device – the SERCA-LVAD TRIAL, Gene Therapy, ISSN:0969-7128
Sattler S, Gorelik J, Harding S, et al., 2020, Mediastinal lymphadenopathy, class-switched auto-antibodies and myocardial immune-complexes during heart failure in rodents and humans, Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, ISSN:2296-634X
Sparks H, Dvinskikh L, Firth J, et al., 2020, Development a flexible light-sheet fluorescence microscope for high-speed 3D imaging of calcium dynamics and 3D imaging of cellular microstructure, Journal of Biophotonics, Vol:13, ISSN:1864-063X
Constantinou C, Miranda Almeida A, Chaves Guerrero P, et al., Human pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes as a targetplatform for paracrine protection by cardiac mesenchymal stromalcells, Scientific Reports, ISSN:2045-2322