Professor Nabila Bouatia-Naji

The multidisciplinary laboratory that I lead at PARCC-Inserm has pioneered the identification of genetic causes of mitral valve prolapse and atypical cardiovascular diseases that predominantly affect young women. My team is internationally recognized for its genetic research on fibromuscular dysplasia (FMD), an arteriopathy associated with resistant hypertension and stroke and spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD), a poorly studied form of non-atherosclerotic cardiac ischemia. I have established the genetic model of these diseases and reported the first risk genes through seminal work leveraging human population genetics, functional genomics and high-throughput iPSC modelling of risk genes. So far, our findings point to the high relevance of vascular smooth muscle cells' contractility and extracellular matrix production as key mechanisms underlying the genetic risk for FMD and SCAD.