(Vienna, 01-03-2024) At the beginning of March, Sasha Mendjan took up a §99-(5) assistant professorship in "Synthetic Tissue Biology" as part of the tenure-track model at the Medical University of Vienna. The geneticist heads a research group at IMBA and researches the development, regeneration and diseases of the human heart.
Sasha Mendjan was trained in genetics and biochemistry at Ludwig Maximillian University in Munich and obtained his Ph.D. at the EMBL & University of Heidelberg, working on the chromosomal regulation of transcription. During his postdoc at the University of Cambridge, he developed a comprehensive differentiation system from human pluripotent stem cells into all major mesoderm lineages, enabling the mechanistic dissection of the underlying specification principles.
Based on these insights, Sasha Mendjan’s group at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences established the first self-organizing cardiac organoids (cardioids), mimicking the chamber-like architecture and all the embryonic compartments of the human heart. The Mendjan team is developing this platform further to understand human cardiogenesis and fetal regeneration and address one of the most significant bottlenecks in biomedical research – the lack of physiological models of the human heart to understand cardiac disease and develop new therapies.
Mendjan Lab at IMBA