Dr Parveen Sharma BSc, PhD

Drug-induced cardiac damage is a known side-effect of many traditional and newer cancer treatments. This has led to the development of cardio-oncology, a field dedicated to minimising and managing the toxic side effects of cancer drugs on the heart. My group has optimised the development of iPSC-derived cardiac cells from PBMCs from patients who have received cancer drugs so that we can investigate the structural and functional differences in cardiomyocytes between patients who display drug-induced cardiotoxicity and those who show no cardiovascular damage.

Our research aims to understand, predict, and reduce the toxic effect caused by multiple cancer medications including anthracyclines, targeted therapies, and immunotherapies. These different classes of drugs are known to cause both acute and chronic damage to the heart that can manifest as a reduction in left ventricle ejection fraction, cardiomyopathy, arrhythmias, and heart failure.

Often, drugs cause toxicity not because of the parent compound but because of a toxic metabolite formed in the liver. As such we are interested in the development of liver models to not only investigate the toxicity in the liver but to also use these models to generate metabolites that may damage the heart. As such we have developed a 3D liver spheroid model to understand drug-induced liver toxicity. We have further optimised a protocol to differentiate induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) into hepatocytes.