Grant Award

Francesca Seta, PhD, Awarded American Heart Association, NIH Grants to Develop Cures for Aortic Aneurysm

Francesca Seta, PhD, associate professor of medicine at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, has received a one-year, $100,000 grant from the American Heart Association (AHA) and a two-year, $245,250 grant from the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI). The grants will fund the creation of experimental tools leading to the development of novel therapies for aortic aneurysm.

Aortic aneurysms (AA) are potentially lethal aortic dilatations affecting 80,000 Americans each year. Although the causes of AA are multifactorial, high blood pressure and genetic mutations – such as mutations in the fibrillin-1 gene in Marfan syndrome (MFS) –  are the major risk factors that may lead to the aortic wall eventually dissecting, a tear in the inner layer of the aorta, or rupturing, the complete tear through all three layers with blood flowing into the body cavity. The very limited treatment options include antihypertensive drugs, or surgical repair, which carries a greater than 30% mortality rate and underscores the need for targeted therapies to prevent AA morbidity and deaths.

Seta studies the basic mechanisms of vascular diseases, with an emphasis on the biology of the vascular smooth muscle. These cells make up most of the blood vessel walls and contract and dilate to send blood throughout the body.

Seta seeks to understand the molecular mechanisms of aortic ruptures and dissections with the goal of developing new pharmacological therapies. With these new grants, she will continue to study the enzyme lysine deacetylase sirtuin-1 (Sirt1) to see if it can protect against AA.

With the support of the AHA grant, she and her team will use a computational atlas to identify small molecules able to boost Sirt1 activity, which they believe will beneficially counteract the molecular and cellular sequelae of aortic aneurysms in Marfan syndrome to prevent dissection. NIH grant funding will help Seta produce inducible pluripotent stem cell-derived vascular smooth muscle cells from Marfan patients on which to test the newly identified molecules, a crucial pre-clinical step before lead molecules can advance into further drug development.

Seta also recently received a multiple PI, four-year, $3.1M R01 award from the NIH’s NHLBI to further the understanding of aortic aneurysms for her project, “Thiol redox signaling in aortic aneurysm.”

Seta received her BSc/MSc from the Università degli Studi “G. d’Annunzio” Chieti-Pescara, Italy and her PhD from New York Medical College.