Professor James Hudson

I am a Senior Group Leader of the Cardiac Bioengineering Group and Co-Deputy Director of the Infection and Inflammation Program at QIMR Berghofer. I am also a Scientific Co-Founder of Dynomics. I completed a Bachelor of Chemical and Biological Engineering (2006) followed by a PhD in Biotechnology (2011) at the University of Queensland. I then did a postdoc supported by the German Cardiology Society with Professor Wolfram-Hubertus Zimmermann in Goettingen, Germany. This work led to a drug toxicology screening service spin-out (Myriamed) and the first in human phase1/2 trial of engineered cardiac patches for patients with heart failure by Repairon (started in 2021). I returned to Australia on an NHMRC Peter Doherty Fellowship and became a group leader at the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Queensland. From 2013 to 2017 Prof Enzo Porrello and co-ran the lab focussed on cardiac maturation and cardiac regeneration. We developed the Heart-Dyno human cardiac organoid platform and discovered multiple mechanisms underpinning cardiomyocyte maturation and cell cycle exit. In the next phase of my career I was supported by a NHMRC CDF1 Fellowship and National Heart Foundation Future Leader Fellowship 1. I moved my laboratory to QIMRB, where I continued working on cardiac maturation and regeneration also in collaboration with Enzo. Currently I am supported by a Snow Medical Fellowship. We are now really focussed on generating large scale systems biology datasets we term ‘Cardiopedia’, to identify therapeutics using personalised medicine approaches. One of our therapeutic focus areas is inflammation induced cardiac dysfunction which underlies a variety of cardiac diseases including heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, acute post-myocardial infarction, sepsis, COVID-19 and some genetic heart diseases.