Overview

The Todd and Karen Wanek Family Program for HLHS at Mayo Clinic is made up of a dedicated, multidisciplinary team of physicians, researchers and allied health staff members working together to discover and apply innovative solutions for Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome (HLHS). Our mission is to support education and research on why and how heart disease develops and progresses, and to collaborate in developing cell-based therapies to repair heart tissue. The program's goal is to delay or prevent heart failure in people with HLHS.

Based on their clinical and scientific expertise and experience, staff members are grouped into research teams, with each team dedicated to one of the program's scientific focus areas:

The program's fourth focus area, the biorepository, is a crosscutting piece of infrastructure that supports work in the first three scientific focus areas.

Together, these teams comprise one integrated program. They actively collaborate, sharing their expertise and latest findings with each other to accelerate HLHS research.

The program also collaborates with a larger collaborative initiative, the Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome Consortium. The HLHS Consortium was developed to give patients more options when it comes to participating in groundbreaking clinical trials and other HLHS research, no matter their location. The consortium's national network connects regional centers to accelerate the pace of completing clinical trials and provide a financial model to sustain a continuous pace of HLHS research and innovation. Learn more about the HLHS Consortium.