Chad Weldy, MD, PhD
Cardiologist and physician-scientist @Stanford | Instructor of Medicine | working to accelerate precision medicine through epigenetics and RNA editing
profiles.stanford.edu/chad-weldy
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDThrilled that @stanfordmedicine.bsky.social Comms highlighted our work on epistasis in their Insights channel! 🧬💛🌟 Grateful to work with an incredible team: my postdoc advisor @euanashley.bsky.social, co-corresponding author Bin Yu, and co–first author Tiffany Tang. med.stanford.edu/news/insight...
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDA relatively random thread about the degrees of NIH Directors. Not surprisingly, almost all NIH Directors have been straight MD holders. However, there have been two MD-PhD holders (actually one PhD, MD and one MD, PhD, but no combined MD-PhD holders) 1/13
- Super excited we made the cover of @natcardiovascres.nature.com! Work represents ADAR1 RNA editing within the vascular wall
- Hard to understate how wonderful it is to see our manuscript in print today @natcardiovascres.nature.com. We discover ADAR1 to control dsRNA sensor MDA5 in atherosclerosis, creating a new paradigm of endogenous dsRNA sensing as a causal mechanism of disease. Let's get into it 👇 #RNAsky rdcu.be/eGEyu
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDExcited for a major milestone in our efforts to map enhancers and interpret variants in the human genome: The E2G Portal! e2g.stanford.edu This collates our predictions of enhancer-gene regulatory interactions across >1,600 cell types and tissues. Uses cases 👇 1/
- Hard to understate how wonderful it is to see our manuscript in print today @natcardiovascres.nature.com. We discover ADAR1 to control dsRNA sensor MDA5 in atherosclerosis, creating a new paradigm of endogenous dsRNA sensing as a causal mechanism of disease. Let's get into it 👇 #RNAsky rdcu.be/eGEyu
- What is RNA editing and how does this relate to coronary artery disease?? There's a lot here but it's fascinating. A to I editing is an under appreciated area of biology, where ADAR enzymes deaminate adenosine to inosine. Thousands of RNA molecules are edited all the time!
- When ADAR editing occurs in the coding region of a transcript, it serves as an A -> G edit and can change protein function. Even in coral and octopus in response to temperature changes of the ocean, whoa! Although amazingly, the majority of editing sites are non-coding (hmm)
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View full threadThere's a lot here and a lot more in the paper. But I get excited thinking about the potential. From rare to complex disease to novel mechanisms with real potential for a precision guided approach to therapy. A lot to do! @stanfordmedicine.bsky.social @stanforddeptmed.bsky.social
- I am tremendously excited to share our work revealing the epigenomic landscape of single vascular cells. We discover that enhancers are not only cell type but vascular site specific and regulate the genetic drivers of disease risk. Let's dive in! 🧬👇 #epigenetics www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....
- A fascinating observation going back nearly 60 years is that different vascular territories have distinct susceptibility to disease, and vascular disease is uniquely site specific, but why??
- Beautiful work in developmental biology going back decades has revealed that vascular diversity has a developmental basis, and that these vascular territories have distinct biology
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View full threadThis work is exciting in that it defines an important area of vascular biology with key relevance to understanding genetic drivers of disease risk, couldn't have been done with out the amazing support of Tom Quertermous and all our amazing collaborators and team @stanfordmedicine.bsky.social
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDwww.cbsnews.com/video/saving.... This video shows the real and devastating impact of the cuts to the NIH funding. My heart aches from hearing the story of Natalie Phelps who has stage 4 colorectal cancer and how she and her family are being impacted.
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDSenate committee endorses NIH budget increase, rebuking Trump administration’s proposed 40% cut www.statnews.com/2025/07/31/n...
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDThis is the stupidity of it all—carve outs for AK make no sense for the people of Alaska when the UW/Harborview/Seattle Children’s system is the referral destination for anything too complicated for Anchorage
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDNational Science Foundation staff were notified that their office space will be taken over by Department of Housing and Urban Development. It's unclear where the 1,800+ NSF employees will work. Renovation plans apparently include a personal gym for the HUD secretary & family eos.org/research-and...
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDAtul Butte died yesterday. The world lost a giant. A big bear of a man. With a huge smile. With love for everyone. With energy that could power a room. I loved everything about Atul. I loved how he was always happy. I loved how excited he was about science and helping people.
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDIf you weren't angry enough already, here are the rates of non-competitive renewals through May. 4008 Non-competitive renewals were due to be funded in May. The total funded was 99! Some is due to terminations, but most is due to slow grant making due to DOGE review and other impediments. 1/2
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDThe NIH represents incredible value for the US economy and for the people of the world. We need to safeguard its future and that of our students and trainees. @rachelkeranen.bsky.social and I share our thoughts in today’s LA Times. www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDSenator Durbin noted that some (I believe Republican Senators) had indicated the US had been doing more than its share of biomedical research and it was time for other countries take a turn. I felt I had to interrupt to respond...
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDDelighted to share our latest work deciphering the landscape of chromatin accessibility and modeling the DNA sequence syntax rules underlying gene regulation during human fetal development! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Read on for more: 🧵 1/16 #GeneReg 🧬🖥️
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDEven as someone who has followed everything going on at the NIH very closely, this story made my heart sink. I hope Americans watch this and see the impact of shutting down science. This effects everyone.
- “This doesn't feel like a strategic plan to reorganize and make the NIH better and more efficient. It feels like a wrecking ball,” says an NIH insider, who asked 60 Minutes to protect his identity due to his concern about reprisal. cbsn.ws/3EKcER9
- Tons of fun at our annual #MyHeartCounts 5K! Amazing event and the one time a year I remember that racing a 5K is….hard, lol. Hit my goal time and looking forward to next year! @stanfordmedicine.bsky.social
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDPlease join us next Tuesday April 29th at 1 pm EST for our next Symposium on Precision Genomics: CRISPR and Single-Cell Technologies in Vascular Biology, featuring #AaronJames @bgcoonlab.bsky.social @chadweldy.bsky.social and moderated by @vsleekim.bsky.social ! Register here: tinyurl.com/yhcdr68a
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDHere is the formal announcement. Jay Bhattacharya and RFK Jr. need to explain. Who exactly are they trying to "make healthy?" www.whi.org/md/news/whi-...
- Happy to be part of this NAVBO Symposium on precision genomics (Tues, April 29, 2025). Excited to present on the epigenomic landscape of single vascular cells-ranging from single cell, regulatory networks, and ML prediction of variant effect, so much to talk about! members.navbo.org/calendar-of-...
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDSigh. This study claiming a lack of association between ApoB & plaque has blown up in the media with the typical podcaster/youtuber grifters jumping on it. Beyond the obvious (small N, non-randomized), here are a few reasons the study doesn't show what people claim 🧵: www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/...
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDThrilled to share the🥇paper from the lab @ahajournals.bsky.social. Here we continue to unravel the mysteries of the 9p21.3 CAD locus showing it drives VSMC transition into an osteochondrogenic state, promoting calcification. @clintomics.bsky.social @UWMadison CRB. www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/...
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDFrom an operational security perspective, this is the highest level of fuckup imaginable. These people cannot keep America safe.
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDThere are days in life that shake you. I’m shattered 💔 to share that I just found out that the US Government terminated my 2024 NIH Director’s Early Independence Award (~$2 million), threatening my long-promised assistant professor job at Columbia University & academic career... 1/🧵
- Yeah nice work @shoaclarke.bsky.social and team! Great to see this out in print!
- Most hearts have right dominant coronary anatomy but some have left. Why? Is it random? When/how is dominance established? Now out in @cellpress.bsky.social, the 1st GWAS of coronary dominance + experiments implicating CXCL12 as a driver of human coronary patterning! www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDI am not going to call this a Bluetorial, because I do not want to sully that term (which, at least I, find joyful). Let’s call it a Orwellial.
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDFrancis Collins, the NIH Director for 12 years, led the Human Genome Project and other NIH efforts for 32 years, resigned today. Key words from his resignation letter www.nytimes.com/2025/03/01/u...
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDStanford's president has announced that the university is enacting a staff hiring freeze, citing NIH funding cuts to "indirect costs" of research, as well as a proposal to Congress to increase endowment tax universities pay. "Taken together, these are very significant risks to the university."
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDThe Trump administration's efforts to slash research funding have US graduate students, postdocs and other early-career scientists fearing for their careers. Some might leave the country -- or abandon research altogether. go.nature.com/43ao2zq
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDAlmost all grant-review meetings under Trump 2.0 remain suspended at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), preventing the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research from spending much of its US$47 billion annual budget. go.nature.com/4gM6oW4
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDProud to share this new pub from my lab - “Novel Therapeutic Approach Targeting CXCR3 to Treat Immunotherapy Myocarditis” www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/.... Congrats to first authors Vivian Huang and Yin Sun. Our first foray into targeted therapy for this devastating autoimmune condition
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDYes
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDInstead of cutting costs for working families, Donald Trump is slashing the federal investments that fund their lifesaving care, fuel their local economy, and lower their health care costs. It’s cruel, short-sighted, and will cost jobs and devastate millions of families.
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDThis is what amounts to an ILLEGAL & indiscriminate funding cut for research centers everywhere. It will mean shuttering labs across the country, layoffs in red & blue states, and derailing lifesaving research on everything from cancer to opioid addiction. We all need to speak out to save lives.
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDScience is absolutely key to the US's success but this government's intention to now dramatically reduce the part of the federal grants that go to the university (in addition to the researchers; the "indirects") is like removing the unseen roots of a tree and expecting it to continue to flourish.
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhD1. Today the NIH director issued a new directive slashing overhead rates to 15%. I want to provide some context on what that means and why it matters. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...
- Raining and 20+mph winds on the coast? Perfect for the SF half marathon! @stanforddeptmed.bsky.social Cardiology improving their VO2 max this morning. A sign from a spectator read “Seems like an ineffective way to warm up”, true very true
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDOur new paper in Circulation shows how #ADMET-AI predicts cardiotoxicity of drugs and generates interpretable insights www.ahajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1...
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDThis isn't mine at all, but the Magic School Bus TV cartoon, which inspired untold millennials including myself, originated as an NSF grant 🧪 www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDModern GWAS can identify 1000s of significant hits but it can be hard to turn this into biological insight. What key cellular functions link genetic variation to disease? I'm very excited to present our new work combining associations and Perturb-seq to build interpretable causal graphs! A 🧵
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDJust in time for new year's resolutions, @euanashley.bsky.social and @pbs.org share insights into just how profound #exercise can be for the human body. #newyear2025
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDExtracellular matrix in vascular homeostasis and disease by Lu Zhang, Jing Zhou & Wei Kong: rdcu.be/d5oD9
- Bringing in the new year on the coast! So much science to do in 2025, ready to get after it!
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDA coding variant in BAG3 protects against dilated cardiomyopathy but increases risk for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and is found to modify the effects of pathogenic TTN variants jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDOur ChromBPNet preprint out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Huge congrats to Anusri! This was quite a slog (for both of us) but we r very proud of this one! It is a long read but worth it IMHO. Methods r in the supp. materials. Bluetorial coming soon below 1/
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDSpatial omics of human arteries to understand what drives atherosclerosis: highlights role of the microvasculature (vasa vasorum), adventitial inflammation, migration of vascular smooth muscle cells (and more) nature.com/articles/s44...
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhD“In the end, science doesn’t move one paper at a time; it moves one inspired person at a time. That’s really our currency as scientists—and it’s our duty to pass that inspiration along to the public. We need to make science a much more human endeavor, because one inspired person…
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDTitin is massive in size – at 3,800kD it’s the largest protein in your body and really important for heart function. In a new paper, led by Yuri Kim and the Seidman lab, we describe an enhancer critical for normal Titin expression. Here is the overview (1/n) Paper: www.jci.org/articles/vie...
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDWhat do GWAS and rare variant burden tests discover, and why? Do these studies find the most IMPORTANT genes? If not, how DO they rank genes? Here we present a surprising result: these studies actually test for SPECIFICITY! A 🧵on what this means... (🧪🧬) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhD🎆4 years in the making! Thrilled to share the 1st spatial single cell aging clock ⏰ www.nature.com/articles/s41... We use #AI + spatial transcriptomics to discover what makes some cells age faster/slower in the brain 🧠 Led by Eric Sun and awesome collaboration w/ @brunetlab.bsky.social🧵
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDHead into next week with the confidence of a crow. 🪶
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDThe guidebook writer Rick Steves believes in the transformative power of travel. “I want to go home a little bit different, a little less afraid, a little more thankful, a little better citizen of the planet.” Read or listen to more on The Interview. nyti.ms/3ZApmZi
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDImmunologists, time to embrace your inner neuroscientist 🧠🧪 Macrophages (yes, #macrophages) release glutamate (yes, #glutamate) to sensory neurons engaging in the muscle stretch reflex. Very cool paper! #neuroscience #immunology www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDCongrats @shoaclarke.bsky.social! Highlighting an important gap in care for an estimated 1.7 million (!) US adults.
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhD📢 Excited that #unitox is selected as a #NeurIPS2024 spotlight!💡 We created #LLM agent to analyze >100K pages of FDA docs from all approved drugs ➡️ new database annotating 8 toxicity types for 2400 drugs. Validated by clinicians. openreview.net/pdf?id=Vb1vV...
- Nice day to find a tree! Turns out the 6 and 3 year old crowds have significant opinions on trees
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDIt seems to me that the time is ripe for a Bluesky thread about how—and maybe even why—to befriend crows. (1/n)
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDGuys, it feels weird to post this here, but... it's the anniversary of the first human-to-human heart transplant! Technically, I'm a day late as it's already Dec. 4 in Cape Town, South Africa, where on Dec. 3, 1967, the heart of Denise Darvall (25) was placed into the chest of Louis Washkansky (56).
- Reposted by Chad Weldy, MD, PhDFirst day of @WeillCornell CV Research Symposium- starting w welcome message from @HeartBobH & Geoff Pitt. Look forward to an exciting day of science and friendship w colleagues from Duke Med, Penn CV Institute, & Stanford CVI. #cardiosky #medsky
