Elisabeth Zeisberg endeavors to understand the pathogenesis of cardiac fibrogenesis by linking experimental models to clinical observations. Within this aim she identified endothelial to mesenchymal transition (EndMT) as a new mechanism which contributes to fibrosis (Nat Med 2007). Based on the finding that EndMT and fibrogenesis is driven by epigenetic silencing of fibrosis-suppressor genes via aberrant DNA methylation (Nat Med 2010), the Zeisberg team was one of the first to demonstrate gene-specific reversal of such DNA methylation and the first to demonstrate its utility as anti-fibrotic therapy in vivo (Nat Comm 2018).
Elisabeth Zeisberg obtained an MD degree at the University Medical Center Göttingen in 1999 and received postdoctoral training at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Cardiovascular Division and the Center for Matrix Biology at Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA. In 2006 she was appointed junior faculty at Harvard Medical School, and she accepted a call as professor at the University Medical Center of Göttingen Germany in 2011. She is a board certified specialist for internal medicine with a focus on cardiovascular disease as well as a Principle Investigator at the German Center for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK). Since 2018 she serves as an Editorial Board Member of Nature Springer’s Clinical Epigenetics (https://clinicalepigeneticsjournal.biomedcentral.com/).