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
Jabbour RJ, Owen TJ, Pandey P, et al., 2019, Future potential of engineered heart tissue patches for repairing the damage caused by heart attacks, Expert Review of Medical Devices, ISSN:1743-4440
Shun-Shin MJ, Leong KMW, Ng FS, et al., 2019, Ventricular conduction stability test: a method to identify and quantify changes in whole heart activation patterns during physiological stress, Ep-europace, Vol:21, ISSN:1099-5129, Pages:1422-1431
Sattler S, Baxan N, Chowdhury R, et al., Characterization of acute TLR-7 agonist-induced hemorrhagic myocarditis in mice by multi-parametric quantitative cardiac MRI, Disease Models & Mechanisms, Vol:12, ISSN:1754-8403, Pages:1-10
Owen TJ, Harding SE, 2019, Multi-cellularity in cardiac tissue engineering, how close are we to native heart tissue?, Journal of Muscle Research and Cell Motility, Vol:40, ISSN:0142-4319, Pages:151-157
Watson S, Duff J, Bardi I, et al., 2019, Biomimetic electromechanical stimulation to maintain adult myocardial slices in vitro, Nature Communications, Vol:10, ISSN:2041-1723