Lab Overview
My research laboratory seeks to identify mechanisms responsible for human congenital heart disease, the most common cause of still-births in the U.S. and one of the major contributors to morbidity and mortality in infants and toddlers. We believe that by understanding the mechanisms regulating growth and differentiation of heart precursor cells during early embryonic development we can then apply these principles to understand the pathogenesis of adult onset heart diseases such as heart failure and arrhythmia where re-activation of early embryonic developmental program plays a central role. We currently use both genetically-modified mice as our living model to understand the biology of heart development as well as embryonic stem cells as a test-tube model to study the process of heart cell formation.
Recent News
2025
SDDS 2025: Stanford Drug Discovery Symposium
April 28-29, 2025
Mark your calendars! The Stanford Drug Discovery Symposium has become a cornerstone in the drug discovery community for networking and collaboration. SDDS 2025 offers a unique opportunity for all members of the drug discovery community – including researchers, pharmaceutical companies, investment groups, academia, and the broader biomedical community – to share ideas and innovations.
2024
April 25, 2024
Congratulations to former post-doctoral fellow Dr. Soah Lee (now an Assistant Professor of Pharmacology at SungKyunkwan University in Seoul, Korea) for published a first author paper on the RM1 group project in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This was a multi-institutional/multi-PI work involving 6 labs at University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Washington, and Stanford to address the pathologic phenotype of myosin heavy chain 7 mutation G256E.
April 20, 2024
Congratulations to Ms. Sidra Xu, undergraduate research assistant in lab, for winning the highly competitive Barry Goldwater Scholarship that will provide financial support and educational expenses during her final year of college.
April 8, 2024
Congratulations to lab members Tahmina Samad, Alireza Raissadati, Carissa Lee, Sidra Xu, Paul Heinrich, and former lab member William Goodyer for publishing a book chapter on the history, development, and disease of the cardiac conduction system in Current Topics in Developmental Biology
April 1, 2024
Congratulations to Dr. Sean Wu for being selected as the Chair-Elect of the Basic Cardiovascular Sciences (BCVS) Council of the American Heart Association for 2024-2026. He will assume this role on July 1st, 2024 and then become the Council Chair in July1st, 2026.
March 15, 2024
Congratulations to former lab manager Daniel Lee who has been accepted to medical school at Uniformed Services University for Health Sciences (USUHS) and will be starting his training to become a physician in July, 2024.
March 1, 2024
Congratulations to Carissa Lee, the Wu lab manager, for her acceptances to multiple MD-PhD/MSTP training programs including University of California, San Diego, University of Washington, and Case Western University. She will be starting her training to become a physician scientist at University of Washington School of Medicine in June, 2024.
January 31, 2024
Congratulations to Dr. Sean Wu for his election to the American Association of Physician (AAP). The AAP is one of the oldest medical honor society in the country that recognizes exceptionally accomplished physician-scientists for their contributions to the biomedical research field.
2023
December 11, 2023
Congratulations to Dr. Sean Wu for receiving a multi-PI R01 grant from the NIH/NHLBI together with Dr. James Martin at Baylor University to address the inhibitory role of cell-contact on adult and human iPSC-derived cardiomyocyte proliferation with the focus on their effects on Hippo/Yap and Wnt signaling crosstalk. Dr. Wu’s role will be to examine the effects of perturbing cell-contact and Hippo/Yap and Wnt signaling using human iPSC-CMs model.
October 15, 2023
Congratulations to Dr. Tahmina Samad, post-doctoral fellow in the Cardiovascular Institute, for receiving the CIRM/ISCBRM Physician Scientist Post-doctoral Fellowship Award that will be supporting her research work on metabolomic analysis of human iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes from hypoplastic left heart syndrome patients and blood biomarker for heart failure in single ventricle patients. This funding starts on July 1st, 2024.
September 26, 2023
Congratulations to Dr. Sean Wu on being a co-principal investigator of the Advanced Research Project Agency for Health (ARPA-H) team that recently received a five-year $26.9M cooperative agreement to 3D bioprint full-scale human-sized hearts from cardiac cells that are in vitro differentiated from human iPSCs. This HEART project (led by Dr. Mark Skylar-Scott in the Pediatrics Basic Science and Engineering Program and the Department of Bioengineering) brings together fifteen different labs at Stanford to work together to address challenges in designing, constructing, and functionally testing a beating human-sized heart.
August 14, 2023
Congratulations to former lab members Jan Willem Buikema and Dr. Wu on their review article describing the use of cardiomyocyte proliferation pathway regulation to generate large population of human iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes published in the journal Development.
July 15, 2023
Congratulations to lab member Tahmina Samad, post-doctoral fellow in the Cardiovascular Institute, for publishing an editorial article in Nature Cardiovascular Research on the various in silico, in vitro, and in vivo models used in understanding the pathogenic mechanisms of congenital heart diseases.
July 10, 2023
Congratulations to Dr. Ali Reza Rais Sadati, a post-doc fellow in Pediatric Cardiology, for receiving a 3rd year support for his research on immunogenicity of cell free nucleic acids in pediatric heart transplant rejection.
July 1, 2023
Congratulations to Dr. Wu for starting his appointment as Chair of the Scientific Committee and as a member of the Board of Director of the Sarnoff Cardiovascular Foundation.
June 1, 2023
Congratulations to lab member Paul Heinrich, MD-PhD student, for publishing a commentary article in the Journal of Cardiovascular Aging on the mechanism of cardiomyocyte proliferation and maturation regulated by LRRC10 from a recently published paper in Science.
May 1, 2023
Congratulations to lab member Han Zhu, on her new appointment as an Assistant Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular Medicine) at Stanford University School of Medicine/Stanford Health Care and as the Director of the Translational Cardio-Oncology Research in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine. Her new research lab will be housed on the 3rd floor of the Biomedical Innovation (BMI) building.
March 15, 2023
Congratulations to MD-PhD student Francisco Galdos for his new paper describing the left ventricular cardiomyocyte predominant differentiation of human iPSCs using the standard Wnt on/off protocol as revealed by TBX5-Cre/LoxP-TurboGFP and MYL2-tdTomato double fluorescent reporter line published in eLife.
February 10, 2023
Congratulations to Dr. Wu for organizing a highly successful Keystone Symposium on Cardiac Development and Disease: From Genes to Cures at Eldorado Hotel in Santa Fe, NM together with Drs. Christine Seidman (Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School) and Wolfram Zimmerman (University of Gottengen). Over 200 attendees participated in-person and online discussing mechanisms of heart development, genetics of cardiomyopathy, and regenerative therapy using stem cells. Current (Ali Reza Rais Sadati, Tahima Samad, Francisco Galdos, Paul Hein, Will Goodyer, Carissa Lee) and former (Soah Lee, Jan Buikema) members of Wu lab presented talks and posters at the meeting as well.
January 25, 2023
Congratulations to Dr. Sean Wu for his election to the Association of University Cardiologists, an organization that represents the 120 most recognized cardiologists in the U.S. including many of whom are chiefs or chairs of cardiology division/department in the country.
January 19, 2023
Congratulations to lab member Han Zhu, an Instructor in Cardiovascular Medicine, on publishing a review commentary in the journal Med on a recently published paper from Axelrod et al in Nature describing the role of troponin I peptide as an autoimmune trigger of myocarditis.
January 1, 2023
Congratulations to lab member Will Goodyer, on his new appointment as an Assistant Professor of Pediatric (Cardiology) at Stanford and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital (LPCH). His new research lab will be housed in the CCSR building.
March 15, 2023
Congratulations to MD-PhD student Francisco Galdos for his new paper describing the left ventricular cardiomyocyte predominant differentiation of human iPSCs using the standard Wnt on/off protocol as revealed by TBX5-Cre/LoxP-TurboGFP and MYL2-tdTomato double fluorescent reporter line published in eLife.
2022
December 15, 2022
Congratulations to Dr. Wu and collaborator Dr. Patricia Nguyen on publishing a review commentary on sex difference in immune checkpoint inhibitor-mediated myocarditis in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
December 1, 2022
Congratulations to lab members Dr. Han Zhu, Instructor in Medicine, Vivian Huang, research assistant, and Francisco Galdos, MD-PhD student, on their full-length review article on the use of single cell profiling and deep immune-phenotyping to understand the pathogenic mechanism of immune checkpoint inhibitor-induced myocarditis.
November 10, 2022
Congratulations to MD-PhD student Paul Heinrich for receiving a two-year Pre-doctoral Fellowship from the American Heart Association for his research project on understanding the cell-cell contact mechanism regulating cardiomyocyte proliferation.
November 1, 2022
Congratulations to MD-PhD student Francisco Galdos on being named a recipient of the Harold Weintraub Graduate student Research Award for his PhD thesis work describing human iPSC-based modeling of cardiac development using single cell RNA sequencing, machine learning, and CRISPR-Cas9 targeting of fluorescent reporters. He has been invited to present his research at the annual Weintraub Symposium at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center in 2023.
October 20, 2022
Congratulations to MD-PhD student Francisco Galdos and Stanford undergraduate student Sidra Xu for their new paper describing the use of machine learning tools to perform automated annotation of cell identity in the developing embryo toward a fully-formed 4-chamber heart published in Nature Communications.
September 1, 2022
Congratulations to lab member Will Goodyer, an Instructor of Pediatric Cardiology at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital (LPCH) at Stanford, on his new paper published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation describing the use of near infrared dye-conjugated antibody targeting the surface receptor contactin-2 to live image the entire cardiac conduction system in mice.
August 1, 2022
Congratulations to Dr. Sean Wu for his new appointment as the interim Senior Vice Chair for Academic Affairs in the Department of Medicine at Stanford University.
July 19, 2022
Congratulations to lab member Han Zhu, an Instructor in Cardiovascular Medicine, for publishing the first single cell profiling study on immune cell repertoire of patients with myocarditis due to immune checkpoint inhibitor treatment for cancer and the confirmatory studies in PD1 knock out mice in the journal Circulation.
July 1, 2022
Congratulations to Dr. Wu for starting his appointment as Vice Chair of the Scientific Committee of the Sarnoff Cardiovascular Foundation and as the Programming Chair of the Sarnoff Foundation 43rd Annual Scientific Meeting in April, 2023 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
March 18, 2022
Congratulations to Dr. Wu and lab members Will Goodyer, Instructor in Pediatric Cardiology, Nazan Puluca, post-doctoral fellow, and Francisco Galdos, MD-PhD student, for their contributions to the Tabula Sapien Consortium paper published in Science.
February 15, 2022
Congratulations to lab members Francisco Galdos, MD-PhD student, Sharon Paige, Instructor in Pediatrics, and former lab member Adrija Darsha, research assistant, on their protocol article in Methods in Molecular Biology describing the generation of fluorescent reporter lines to purify pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes.
February 1, 2022
Congratulations to lab member Tahmina Samad, post-doctoral fellow in the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute, for her Clinician-Scientist Development Award from the Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub that will partial stipend and training support for two years.
2021
December 15, 2021
Congratulations to lab member Han Zhu, an Instructor in Cardiovascular Medicine, for being award an K08 Mentored Clinician-Scientist Development Award from the NIH/NHLBI to support her career development and her basic and translational research work addressing the mechanism of immune checkpoint inhibitor-induced myocarditis.
October 1, 2021
Congratulations to lab members Han Zhu, an Instructor in Medicine, for publishing an article describing the role of cardiac troponin I monitoring for the diagnosis of myocarditis during immune checkpoint inhibitor treatment for cancer in the Journal of American College of Cardiology-CardioOncology.
September 1, 2021
Congratulations to Dr. Wu for receiving a 4-yr collaborative research grant from the National Science Foundation on RECODE- Directing and Controlling Cardiac Differentiation Through Cellular and Microenvironmental Manipulation and Application of Machine-Learning. This project will develop a computational prediction algorithm for outcomes of hiPSCs differentiation in vitro by iteratively testing the consequences of various chemical and physiological cues applied during differentiation in 2D and 3D environment.
July 21, 2021
Congratulations to lab member Han Zhu, an Instructor in Medicine, for publishing a full-length review article in the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology on the clinical phenotype and basic mechanisms of immune checkpoint inhibitor-induced myocarditis.
July 1, 2021
Congratulations to lab member Tahmina Samad, a post-doctoral fellow in the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute, for publishing a full-length review article on the use of the single cell RNA sequencing tool to study cardiac development and congenital heart disease in the journal Seminars in Cell and Developmental Biology.