Prof Rob Krams
MD, PhD
Research Overview
Cardiovascular disease, Atherosclerosis, Biomaterials, Epigenetic, Mechanobiology, Fluid Structure Interaction, Tissue biomechanics, Stents
Interests
Professor Krams' research is focussed on the molecular mechanism underlying biomechanical stimuli applied to blood vessels and endothelial cells. To that end he uses a combination of engineering techniques (imaging, systems biology and synthetic biology) and molecular techniques (high throughput, qPCR, CRISPR/ life cell imaging) to study the interaction of gene expression and shear stress and wall stress on cells in culture and in whole animals.
His research has led to the development of new devices for patient and experimental studies and to the development of new analysis techniques for images obtained by microscopes. The work that hase started in London consists of imaging of animals, FSI modelling and application of system biology and mult-scale modelling to vascular biology. We have developed a pipeline consisting of accurate identification of the mechanical environment of endothelial cells in vivo, their isolation by laser capture, RNA isolation and coding anf non-coding gene network synthesis. As bioinformatics tools are still in their infancy, we have a high throughput CRISPr validation platform for evaluation of the interactome. Finally, methods to replace diseased modules by synthetic biology are being explored as well. We specially focus on small and long noncoding RNA in our group.