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.