Summary
Sian Harding is Professor of Cardiac Pharmacology at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, and Director of the Imperial Cardiac Regenerative Medicine Centre https://www.imperial.ac.uk/bhf-regenerative-medicine/.
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 was 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, is on the Board of the British Society for Gene and Cell Therapy and has been elected as a Fellow to the AHA, ESC and ISHR. She was Special Advisor to the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee on Regenerative Medicine and is now a member of the CGT Catapult: Pluripotent stem cells programme Advisory Panel.
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
Todorova VB, Baxan N, Delahaye M, et al., 2023, Drug-based mobilisation of mesenchymal stem/stromal cells improves cardiac function post myocardial infarction, Disease Models and Mechanisms, Vol:16, ISSN:1754-8403, Pages:1-28
Dark N, Cosson M-V, Tsansizi LI, et al., 2023, Generation of left ventricle-like cardiomyocytes with improved structural, functional, and metabolic maturity from human pluripotent stem cells, Cell Reports: Methods, Vol:3, ISSN:2667-2375
Fassina D, Costa CM, Bishop M, et al., 2023, Assessing the arrhythmogenic risk of engineered heart tissue patches through in silico application on infarcted ventricle models, Computers in Biology and Medicine, Vol:154, ISSN:0010-4825
Dvinskikh L, Sparks H, Brito L, et al., 2023, Remote-refocusing light-sheet fluorescence microscopy enables 3D imaging of electromechanical coupling of hiPSC-derived and adult cardiomyocytes in co-culture, Scientific Reports, Vol:13, ISSN:2045-2322, Pages:1-14
Conference
Mohammadi N, Sanchez-Alonso J, Harding S, et al., 2022, Investigating the functional communication between sympathetic neurons and HiPSC-CMs in vitro, 24th World Congress of the International-Society-for-Heart-Research, ELSEVIER SCI LTD, Pages:S110-S110, ISSN:0022-2828