Abhinav Diwan

The primary interest of Dr. Diwan’s lab is to define the role of lysosomes in cellular homeostasis and response to stress. Dr. Diwan’s training as a cardiologist led him to focus on the role of lysosome function in cardiac myocyte death, which plays a central role in causing heart failure in response to myocardial infarction and pressure overload hypertrophy. Our lab has uncovered evidence for dysregulation of the lysosome machinery as a major contributor to cardiac myocyte loss in myocardial ischemia-reperfusion injury. Our work has also extended these findings to uncover evidence for lysosome dysfunction in various CNS cell types in Alzheimer’s disease and in pancreatic beta cells in obesity-induced diabetes, underscoring the importance of acquired lysosome dysfunction in triggering multiple chronic diseases that are predisposed by common risk factors. As the PI or co-investigator on studies funded through National funding mechanisms, Dr. Diwan and the group have developed the expertise and tools to experimentally perturb and evaluate lysosome biology, concomitantly with disease modeling in in vitro and in vivo systems.