Cynthia St. Hilaire, PhD, FAHA

AHA Scientific Sessions 2026 #AHA26 will take place November 6-9, 2026, in Chicago 💨

Want to contribute to next year’s program? Submit your session ideas for #AHA26 by tomorrow January 6

Would especially love to hear from the vascular biology community

Link here:
forms.office.com/pages/respon...

I'm so happy/relieved about this!

Congratulations to my friend @jboerckel.bsky.social for being awarded the Fuller Albright Award! #asbmr2025

That happy feeling when someone features a graphic you made in their talk 😇 #ASBMR2025 #vascularcalcification #ACDCmedical #MAC

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Trump’s proposed $23 billion in cuts to NIH & NSF could cost the U.S. economy at least $10 billion a year, according to new research. Public science funding drives innovation, productivity, and long-term growth. Slashing it isn’t saving money; it’s losing our future. www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

Pope Macaron V

Thanks for posting us 😁

I am hearing from colleagues that universities (not just the ones in the news) are not receiving payments for spending on active grants - have you heard anything on this?

Yes, follow me then I can DM you

Gemini produced a detailed comment that I am happy to share. DM or email me.

and (5) a conclusion which recaps your main argument and lists your recommendations again

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for example, how the action impacts you and what you care about; whether the agency anticipated or estimated these impacts correctly; any unintended consequences of this approach that the agency did not consider; and what additional details from the agency would help you better understand the action

(2) a background section where you clearly identify the relevant part of the regulation you are commenting on; (3) analysis that lays out your argument and evidence (including with clear citations to any helpful research)

How to Make Your Comments Effective Effective

public comments often have one or more of the following characteristics: (1) an introduction where you explain why you are interested in the regulation and highlight any experience with the subject of the rule that may distinguish your comment;

Thank you Brian!

Click here to find your local representative and let them know how important funding American science is www.house.gov/representati...

Support for government funding agencies like @NIH, @VAResearch, @NSF and many more is essential to understanding health and disease, and finding the next generation of cures. And basic discoveries made one day, help to yield clinical breakthroughs years down the road.

This project is the definition of “high risk, high reward”. It took us years to get here, and was fully dependent on intramural and extramural NIH funding. This is only one science story, but the careers of scientists like me have similar ones.

The completion of the Aims in this new grant will help to define the complex disease mechanisms driving vascular calcification, and this info could be leveraged to develop therapeutics to treat #MAC found in #PAD.

These discoveries, along with our unpublished data, hinted that age-related processes repress CD73 expression in vessels, and that the lack of CD73-mediated adenosine production impacts methionine cycle substrate availability.

Ecto-5′-nucleotidase (Nt5e/CD73)-mediated adenosine signaling attenuates TGFβ-2 induced elastin and cellular contraction | American Journal of Physiology-Cell Physiology | American Physiological Socie... Arterial calcification due to deficiency of CD73 (ACDC) is a rare genetic disease caused by a loss-of-function mutation in the NT5E gene encoding the ecto-5′-nucleotidase (cluster of differentiation 7...

We also made progress towards understanding the role of the damaged elastic lamina observed in the patient vessel specimens tinyurl.com/bdzx57c4

Our @atvbahajournals study not only elucidated the mechanisms underlying the calcification in ACDC patients, but for the first time showed that molecular signatures of ACDC, that is, low CD73 and high FOXO1 and TNAP, are also found in the #MAC of patients with peripheral artery disease #PAD

Frontiers | Cell Phenotype Transitions in Cardiovascular Calcification Cardiovascular calcification was originally considered a passive, degenerative process, however with the advance of cellular and molecular biology techniques...

Part of the “not easy” part, is that mice deficient in CD73 do not recapitulate the human disease de novo! tinyurl.com/9f5m5rnu, tinyurl.com/3cnz5sxs, tinyurl.com/3n425axk

Dysregulation of FOXO1 (Forkhead Box O1 Protein) Drives Calcification in Arterial Calcification due to Deficiency of CD73 and Is Present in Peripheral Artery Disease | Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, an... Objective: The recessive disease arterial calcification due to deficiency of CD73 (ACDC) presents with extensive nonatherosclerotic medial layer calcification in lower extremity arteries. Lack of CD73...

My lab started digging further into the mechanisms driving #ACDC pathogenesis, but it was not easy! Five years after starting my lab, we finally published our follow-up paper which found a lack CD73-generated adenosine promoted FOXO1 nuclear localization tinyurl.com/42xyktvh

At Pitt I also started working on calcific aortic valve disease, but I’ll save that story for another time (but see our cool new paper here: tinyurl.com/yu2tadwk!)

During that time, I obtained a #K22 career transition award to study this rare disease and subsequently began my faculty career at @pittdeptofmed.bsky.social at the Vascular Medicine Institute www.sthilairelab.pitt.edu

Increased activity of TNAP compensates for reduced adenosine production and promotes ectopic calcification in the genetic disease ACDC Patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells reveal treatment strategies for a rare genetic form of arterial calcification.

We spent 4 years trying to start to understand the mechanism. Using patient #fibroblasts and #iPSC we uncovered that the lack of CD73 enzyme led to an upregulation of tissue non-specific alkaline phosphatase, which promotes calcification tinyurl.com/mr65eedp

Vascular pathology of medial arterial calcifications in NT5E deficiency: Implications for the role of adenosine in pseudoxanthoma elasticum Arterial Calcification due to Deficiency of CD73 (ACDC) results from mutations in the NT5E gene encoding the 5′ exonucleotidase, CD73. We now describe…

We followed this up with a pathological study that highlighted the connection between the calcification and damage to the elastic lamina tinyurl.com/56tbankt

**As an aside, we named this disease Arterial Calcifications due to Deficiency of CD73, or ACDC for short 😆