Civelek Lab
Principal Investigator: Mete Civelek
Institution: University of California, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA)
Primary Subfield: Genetics/Genomics
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
PROJECT SUMMARY Coronary artery disease (CAD) remains the leading cause of death in the Western world despite significant advances in early detection and extensive use of lipid-lowering and anti-hypertensive drugs. To date, no single drug has been developed to target the primary disease process in the vessel wall. A complete understanding of the disease susceptibility is urgently needed to develop additional therapies. Common forms of atherosclerosis involve environmental factors, hundreds of genetic variations, and their interactions, each of which exert a relatively small effect on disease susceptibility. The most recent genome-wide association study (GWAS) in nearly six hundred fifty thousand individuals identified 175 independent variants associated with increased risk for CAD. However, most of the underlying genes and the related mechanisms of how these variants contribute to the disease process remain unknown. This proposal outlines an integrative genetics study in a unique resource of human aortic smooth muscle cells (SMCs) isolated from 151 genotyped multi- ethnic heart transplant donors to discover the CAD-associated variants that perturb SMC gene expression and their down…
Active NIH Awards
- 7R01HL166428-04: Systems Genetics of Vascular Smooth Muscle Phenotypes (2026)
- 3R01HL166428-04S1: Systems Genetics of Vascular Smooth Muscle Phenotypes (2026)
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