Bench To Bassinet Program: Research on Pediatric Heart Problems

The Bench to Bassinet Program is a major effort launched by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to learn more about how the heart develops and why children are born with heart problems. This information will be used to develop new ways to help infants, children, teenagers, and adults born with heart disease.

OUR MISSION: The Bench to Bassinet's mission is to accelerate scientific discovery to clinical practice by fostering collaborations of basic, translational and clinical researchers through a flexible program designed to improve outcomes for individuals with congenital heart disease while supporting the needs of the pediatric heart disease research community.

Nobel Prize Awarded to Shinya Yamanaka

The B2B congratulates Shinya Yamanaka, 2012 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, for recognition of his ground-breaking work showing that mature cells can be induced to pluripotency. Dr. Yamanaka is a member and multi-PI of the Gladstone CvDC Center, where he provides expertise in the characterization and differentiation of pluripotent cells induced from cells generated from patients with congenital heart disease.

CvDC Datasets

Several datasets are now publicly available. Information can be found on the DataSets page under the For Researchers tab. Information about novel mutant lines can be found on the Model Organisms page.

CHD GENES

The Pediatric Cardiac Genomics Consortium launches its prospective cohort study

Subjects Enrolled: 5,879
Relatives Enrolled: 7,592

Learn more

The Congenital Heart Disease Genetic Network Study

Investigators from several leading U.S. medical schools, supported by the NHLBI, initiated the Congenital Heart Disease Genetic Network Study (abbreviated CHD GENES) in 2011. The study is using state-of-the-art DNA analyses to uncover the genetic causes of heart defects with which children are born. The early results in recruitment and banking of DNAs have been highly successful. Read the complete article in the February 15, 2013 issue of Circulation Research.

Braveheart, a Long Noncoding RNA Required for Cardiovascular Lineage Commitment

MIT investigators have discovered a long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) that is critical for the in vitro differentiation of embryonic stem cells toward the cardiovascular lineage. These findings provide the basis for the identification of a new class of molecules that regulate cardiac transcriptional networks and for achieving a greater understanding of heart development. Read the complete article in the January 2013 issue of Cell.

Coordination of Chromatin and Gene Expression Patterns During Developmental Transitions in the Cardiac Lineage

Investigators from the Gladstone Institute and MIT recently reported findings that form a basis for understanding developmentally regulated chromatin transitions during lineage commitment and the molecular etiology of congenital heart disease. Read the complete article in the September 2012 issue of Cell.

Blueprint for Making a Heart

Investigators at the Gladstone Institute have mapped the genetic switches in the DNA of embryonic stem cells to develop a blueprint for how a stem cell becomes a heart cell. See the news report on San Francisco's ABC affiliate.