Welcome to the Qyang Lab!

Our stem cell and regenerative medicine laboratory focuses on establishing novel cellular, tissue engineered, and animal models of human cardiovascular disease for the purpose of elucidating causative mechanisms and identifying therapeutic interventions to treat these diseases. Through a close collaboration with several clinicians at Yale, we are able to procure cells from healthy subjects and from those with clinically manifesting cardiovascular diseases. These cells include dermal fibroblasts derived from skin punch biopsies and peripheral mononuclear blood cells, which are reprogrammed into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) by introducing stem cell factors. iPSCs are self-renewable indefinitely and can differentiate into functional cardiovascular cells. Our unique position, made possible by Yale’s clinical resources, gives us the ability to derive unlimited numbers of patient specific cardiovascular cells for use in our investigations into cardiovascular disease mechanisms and the discovery of potential therapeutic treatments by performing high-throughput drug screening. This research paradigm also places our group in a great position to generate autologous, allogeneic or hypoimmunogenic “universal” stem cell based cardiovascular tissues for organ repair.