Dr. Ben Shih-Lei Lai is a biomedical researcher specializing in heart regeneration and immune-cardiac interactions. He was trained as a developmental biologist and received his Ph.D. from National Taiwan University, where he studied gastrulation, cell migration, and left-right asymmetry under the mentorship of Dr. Jeff Shyh-Jye Lee. He then completed his postdoctoral training with Dr. Didier Stainier at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research, where he established a novel comparative platform using regenerative zebrafish and non-regenerative medaka to dissect the mechanisms of cardiac repair. His work discovered that these species exhibit distinct immune responses following cardiac injury and that immune modulation can promote regenerative outcomes.

Since 2018, Dr. Lai joined the Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Academia Sinica, as an assistant research fellow. His laboratory has characterized key roles of macrophages in determining fibrotic versus regenerative healing and identified unique resident cardiac populations in zebrafish that contribute to phagocytic debris clearance, extracellular matrix remodeling, and cardiomyocyte replenishment. These functions appear inducible in medaka through targeted immune modulation. Dr. Lai’s research aims to elucidate how immune responses orchestrate cardiac repair, with the long-term goal of informing regenerative medicine and developing novel therapeutic strategies for heart diseases.

Heart failure is a major cause of morbidity and mortality, in part because of the inability of the human heart to replenish lost tissue post myocardial infarction (MI).  

Unlike adult mice and humans, many vertebrates, including certain fish and amphibians, are capable of endogenous heart regeneration at adult stages.  While zebrafish exhibits a remarkable regenerative capacity after various cardiac insults, this ability is not shared by another teleost, the medaka, despite medaka has similar anatomic structure, physiological conditions and living environment.  In order to identify the cellular and molecular bases for this difference, we performed comparative analyses in zebrafish and medaka following cardiac cryoinjury.  Transcriptomic comparisons point to major differences in immune response and angiogenic neovascularization between these models.  Our functional studies indeed highlighted the complex role of the immune response and neovascularization during cardiac regeneration, and serve as a platform for identifying and testing additional regulators of cardiac repair.

Our primary focus is to investigate the differential immune responses in regenerative (e.g. zebrafish and neonatal mice) and non-regenerative models (e.g. medaka and adult mice), and translate the knowledge into potential therapeutics to modulate the immune response and improve cardiac repair in patients suffered from MI.