Most Outstanding Pharmaceutical Research Article award 2022

We are honored to receive the Finnish Pharmaceutical Society’s “Most Outstanding Pharmaceutical Research Article” award for our article, which elucidated the roles of protein kinase C (PKC) isoforms in central cellular processes regulating cardiac fibrosis and suggested that pharmacological PKC activation may be a...

We are honored to receive the Finnish Pharmaceutical Society’s “Most Outstanding Pharmaceutical Research Article” award for our article, which elucidated the roles of protein kinase C (PKC) isoforms in central cellular processes regulating cardiac fibrosis and suggested that pharmacological PKC activation may be a promising strategy to inhibit myocardial fibrosis.

The article “Distinct regulation of cardiac fibroblast proliferation and transdifferentiation by classical and novel protein kinase C isoforms: possible implications for new antifibrotic therapies” by Tuuli Karhu, Heikki Ruskoaho and Virpi Talman was published in 2021 in Molecular Pharmacology: https://doi.org/10.1124/molpharm.120.000094.

In addition to the new results that may help in advancing the development of anti-fibrotic therapies, this article was important for our lab from the method development point-of-view. The mini-perfusion method Tuuli developed during her MSc thesis project improved isolation of primary cells from adult cardiac tissue. Furthermore, in this work we established a phenotypic characterization pipeline using state-of-the art automated microscopy and image analysis techniques, which will help us to screen anti-fibrotic compounds in the future.