Jeanne Y. Wei, M.D., Ph.D., FACC, FSGC, Professor and Executive Vice Chairman of the Reynolds Department of Geriatrics, is an experienced investigator, teacher, and academic administrator. She has over twenty-two years of experience in research, in mentoring of fellows and junior faculty, and in developing new research and academic basic and clinical programs and initiatives.

She has been studying cardiovascular disease and aging, both in the laboratory and at the bedside, for over two decades. She is interested in enhancing the current understanding of the influence of age on the heart, and why the older person is more vulnerable to poor outcomes following ischemic and hemodynamic stress. She and her research group have found that in response to acute stress, myocardial changes in terms of cell injury and death are increased, while adaptive changes including cardiac myocyte hypertrophy, protein synthesis and RNA synthesis are all decreased in the old compared to the young adult heart.

There are also qualitative as well as quantitative age-associated differences in the pattern of gene expression, including that of the early response genes( e.g., c-fos). Transcription regulation is also apparently altered with aging.

She is currently studying one of the major muscle transcription factors, serum response factor (SRF), on cardiac structure and function. She is also engaged in efforts to develop ways to target specific cells and/or signaling molecules in order to reduce myocardial injury and cell death in older persons in the future.

Selected Publications:

Bodyak ND, Nekhaeva E, Wei JY, Khrapko K. Quantification and sequencing of somatic deleted mtDNA in single cells: the evidence for partially duplicated mtDNA in normal human tissues. Human Mol. Genetics 2001,10:17-24.

Nekhaeva E, Bodyak NB, McGrath S, Van Orsouw N, Pluzhnikov A, Wei JY, Vijg J, Khrapko K. Somatic mtDNA point mutations, as studied in individual cells of the human body, are abundant, commonly homoplasmic, and tissue-specific. PNAS, 2002. 99:5521-5526.

Zhang XM, Azhar G, Furr M, Zhong Y, Wei JY. A model of cardiac functional aging: young adult mice with overexpression of Serum response factor. Am. J. Physiol., 2003; 285: R552-R560.

Huang C, Neuberg D, Johnson B, Locicero J, Liu G, Wei JY, Christiani DC. Expression of Bcl-2 protein is associated with shorter survival in non-small cell lung cancer. Cancer. 2003 Jul 1; 98(1): 135-43.

Wei JY. Understanding the aging cardiovascular system. Geriatrics and Gerontology Int’l 2004; 4: S298-S303.

Warner H, Anderson J, Wei JY., et. al.  Science fact and the SENS agenda.  EMBO reports. 2005; 6: 1006-1008.

Azhar G, Wei JY. Nutrition and Cardiac Cachexia.  Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition and Metabolic Care. 2006, 9: 18-23.