ASSISTANT PROFESSOR Medicine, Cardiology

Yassine Sassi earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in Biochemistry from Pierre et Marie Curie University (Paris, France), and the Ph.D. in Cardiovascular Physiology from the same University in 2009. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the Technischen Universität München (Munich, Germany), Dr. Sassi joined the Cardiovascular Research Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where he is Assistant Professor of Medicine (Cardiology).

Dr. Sassi’s research is focused on studying cardiac and pulmonary physiopathology in both in vitro and in vivo models with a research program targeting different signaling pathways in cardiac hypertrophy, heart failure, pulmonary fibrosis, and pulmonary arterial hypertension. Over the past ten years, Dr. Sassi has studied the detailed molecular mechanisms of cyclic nucleotides and microRNAs in disease pathways in vitro and in vivo. Currently, he is investigating the role of microRNAs in the regulation of diverse cardiac functions; and his team identified several candidate microRNAs that are severely deregulated in different cardiovascular diseases. Dr. Sassi has established a methodology for highly sensitive detection of microRNAs and quantification of their expression levels. His team also elucidated the function of microRNAs in different cardiac cell types that may help in understanding cellular processes and intercellular communication. The direction of the Sassi Laboratory research is concentrated mainly on the use of target proteins, cyclic nucleotides, microRNAs, and exogenous non-coding RNAs, to test new therapeutic approaches for cardiovascular and lung diseases.