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Chair for Gender Medicine

Molecular Cardiology

Our laboratory investigates how the heart adapts to physiological and pathological stress. We are particularly interested in the molecular mechanisms that determine whether the heart maintains function, remodels in a beneficial way, or progresses toward adverse remodelling and heart failure.  

A central focus of our work is exercise-induced cardioprotection. Regular physical activity is one of the most powerful interventions to preserve cardiovascular health, yet the molecular programs that mediate its protective effects are still incompletely understood. We use exercise as a discovery model to identify endogenous pathways that protect the heart, support adaptive remodelling, and may reveal new strategies for preventing or treating cardiovascular disease.  

Sex differences are an integral part of this research program. We investigate how molecular responses to exercise, ageing, and cardiac injury differ between females and males, and how these differences may contribute to sex-specific patterns of cardiovascular protection, disease susceptibility, and heart failure development.  

To address these questions, we combine mouse models of voluntary and lifelong exercise, cardiac ageing, ischemic injury, pressure overload, and other clinically relevant forms of cardiac stress. Current projects examine how exercise-induced protective pathways intersect with disease-related stress pathways in ageing hearts, ischemic injury, chemotherapy-induced cardiotoxicity, and cardiac manifestations of systemic inflammatory and rheumatic diseases.  

Our previous and ongoing work has focused on molecular mediators of cardiac adaptation and repair, including miR-222, CITED4, ageing-associated and circadian pathways, cardiomyocyte–fibroblast crosstalk, endothelial cell biology, and gene-regulatory programs involved in adaptive and maladaptive remodelling. These studies are designed to identify mechanisms that are not only biologically informative, but also potentially targetable.  

Methodologically, our group combines in vivo and in vitro models with molecular biology, advanced histology, multi-omics technologies, gene-therapy approaches, and computational analyses. We are particularly interested in dynamic and cell-specific processes, including cardiomyogenesis, myocardial remodelling, vascular and inflammatory responses, and the transition from compensated adaptation to heart failure.  

By integrating molecular cardiology, sex-difference research, and translational disease models, we aim to better understand how the heart can be protected across the life course. Ultimately, our goal is to identify mechanisms that may help prevent or treat heart failure and other cardiovascular complications of ageing, cancer therapy, ischemic injury, and systemic inflammatory disease.  

Selection of recent posters and flash talks

  • Fynn Betge, Giulia Germena, Juening Kang, Linda Mathez, Chiara Hess, Wesley Abplanalp, David John, Simone Glaser, Julian Wagner, and Carolin Lerchenmüller, Exercise-induced cardioprotection through sex-specific remodelling in ageing murine hearts, SABV symposium 2026, poster. Audience Choice Best Poster Award to Giulia Germena  
  • Fynn Betge, Giulia Germena, Juening Kang, Linda Mathez, Chiara Hess, Simone Glaser, David John, Wesley Abplanalp, Julian Wagner, and Carolin Lerchenmueller, Cardioprotective remodelling: The role of age and sex, Annual Meeting of the Swiss Society of Cardiology 2026, in Swiss Med Wkly. 2026;156:Suppl. 299 https://doi.org/10.57187/5577, poster.  
  • Fynn Betge, Giulia Germena, Juening Kang, Linda Mathez, Chiara Hess, Simone Glaser, David John, Wesley Abplanalp, Julian Wagner, and Carolin Lerchenmüller, Sex-dependent cardioprotective remodelling in ageing murine hearts, EMBL 2026 Symposium on "Sex Differences in Health and Disease", flash talk and poster.  

Publications