Table of Contents
Fulbright Scholarship Strengthens Research
on Weakened Hearts
International collaborators share interest in heart metabolism,
heart disease, high blood pressure and stroke
For four years, cardiovascular researchers Heinrich Taegtmeyer, M.D., Ph.D., and Faadiel Essop, Ph.D., have sustained a collaboration spanning the 8,618 miles (or 13,868 kilometers) between Houston and Cape Town, South Africa.
Collaborators Faadiel Essop, Ph.D., left, and Heinrich Taegtmeyer, M.D., Ph.D., are working even more closely on cardiovascular research, thanks to a Fulbright Scholarship. Photo by Scott Merville
For the next few months, they’ll be right next door to each other. Essop, a director of the Hatter Heart Research Institute at the University of Cape Town, earned a Fulbright Scholarship to work with Taegtmeyer into January 2006.
“The Fulbright Scholars program is highly competitive, and we are fortunate to have him here,” said Taegtmeyer, professor of cardiology at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston and a world leader in the field of cardiovascular metabolism research. “We share a common interest in heart metabolism, heart disease and related disorders such as high blood pressure and diabetes.”
Since they began collaborating in 2001, the Essop and Taegtmeyer labs have published four papers together addressing the effects of hypoxia – oxygen deprivation – on cardiovascular metabolism. Essop’s research focuses on a condition called right ventricle hypertrophy in which the portion of the heart that pumps blood to the lungs for oxygen replenishment becomes overworked, enlarged and weakened.
“Dr. Taegtmeyer has very kindly put me on to a very exciting project here involving a key enzyme that regulates fat metabolism in the heart,” Essop said. “Turn on the enzyme, and you block fat metabolism; turn it off and the heart oxidizes a lot of fat. I’ve worked on this enzyme before, but have a unique opportunity here.”
In addition to the enzyme research, Essop will be advancing his Cape Town work. He has developed a rat model of hypoxia-induced right ventricular cardiac hypertrophy by using a hypobaric chamber to simulate the oxygen deprivation experienced at higher altitudes and then investigating molecular mechanisms underlying the enlargement of the right ventricle from working harder to pump blood to the lungs.
He will be analyzing tissues from Cape Town using new techniques in Taegtmeyer’s lab. Essop’s rat model, combined with a transgenic mouse model developed by Salih Wakil, Ph.D., professor and chairman of biochemistry at Baylor College of Medicine and a collaborator of Taegtmeyer’s, are complementary approaches to understanding heart failure.
There will be plenty of research to write up for publication. In fact, that’s already started. “He’s writing now,” Taegtmeyer said. “And Dr. Essop is also supervising his lab, plus two pending doctoral theses at the Hatter Institute. He’s a very busy man. We are fortunate to have him with us here for a while.”
Keeping in touch with his lab and students via e-mail and instant messaging is challenging, but Essop said his stay at the Medical School already has been refreshing. “It’s a feeling of freedom – intellectual freedom. You can think and be creative.
It’s a great opportunity to focus fully on the work.” It’s also an opportunity for Essop; wife Rehana Essop, M.D., a physician on leave from a practice treating HIV-AIDS patients back home; and children Ziyaad, Aaliyah and Yasin to explore the area on weekends and savor the family’s first trip to the United States.
By Scott Merville, Public Affairs