Manuel Schmid

I completed my medical training at the Ludwig Maximilian University and the Technical University of Munich in Germany. Alongside my medical studies I have spent significant time doing scientific research in the field of acquired and inherited heart diseases, as well as the genetic causes of these diseases.

As part of my medical doctoral dissertation I was able to expand my research training as I received a scholarship from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation to spend a year working under the supervision of Professors Christine and Jonathan Seidman at Harvard Medical School. During this time I gained experience in basic biomedical research by pursuing an experimental project investigating the genetic factors that drive dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) including a focus on the development of novel targeted therapies. I did this by employing genome engineering technologies using CRISPR/Cas-9 and human induced pluripotent stem cells.

Together with the team of Dr Christopher Toepfer at RDM Oxford my current research addresses key novel mechanisms in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). HCM is one of the major contributors of sudden cardiac death in young people and also drives progressive heart failure. It is a disease that does not yet have a sufficient medical treatment outside of symptom alleviation. I study the mechanisms that drive HCM by using human cells, and tissues, with the aim of addressing the unmet clinical need in HCM patients.