Hao Wu

Hao Wu, assistant professor of genetics in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has received a New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The award will provide Dr. Wu with $1.5 million over five years to study how the epigenome of heart muscle cells respond and adapt to changing environmental oxygen levels. The New Innovator Award supports unusually innovative research from early career investigators who are within 10 years of their final degree or clinical residency and have not yet received a research project grant or equivalent NIH grant. Dr. Wu is among 89 grantees chosen this year.

Dr. Wu, who joined Penn in 2016, works to create profiling and editing tools that investigate molecular interactions between environmental factors, such as oxygen levels in tissues, and the epigenome, a battery of chemical marks that control gene expression.

Dr. Wu will use the NIH grant to study the way the epigenome of heart muscle cells can respond and adapt to changing environmental oxygen levels. He plans to create single-cell profiling methods and “oxygen-sensing” epigenome editing enzymes to learn how to rewire the epigenome of mammalian heart muscle cells for the purpose of adult heart regeneration.

“Armed with these new tools, we will have the ability to observe and actively manipulate the interaction between environmental inputs and the epigenome ‘on demand’, providing fundamentally new opportunities to study the environment-epigenome interaction involved in a broad array of biological and pathological processes,” he said.