Building a Pediatric Healthy Heart Cell Atlas Across Ancestries

Congenital heart defects (CHD) occurs in 0.8 percent of live births. Combined with other heart diseases, these defects are leading causes of pediatric deaths and annually consume over $7 billion in U.S. healthcare expenditures. Despite recent discoveries of many etiologies and the availability of diseased tissues, mechanistic insights remain limited due to the absence of a reference framework for normal postnatal heart development. The heart undergoes substantial changes at birth. By year one of life, the human heart triples in size. Studies of rodent heart development provide some insight into these events, but cannot suffice for human data.

To capture the dynamic changes in cellular composition and developmental transcriptional landscape of human postnatal heart development, this team will build a longitudinal heart atlas from infant, childhood, and adolescent tissues across multiple ancestries.