Dr. Zhang's seminal contributions to cardiovascular physiology and cell therapy are:

Use of in vivo NMR spectroscopy to study myocardial bioenergetic abnormality in hypertrophied and failing hearts;
Cardiac cell therapy using adult or human pluripotent stem cells; and
Design of scaffolds to enhance delivery of stem cells for cardiac repair.
Using a canine model of severe LVH secondary to pressure overload, the Zhang lab was the first to demonstrate that in vivo LVH hearts are associated with myocardial bioenergetic inefficiency; the severity of this bioenergetic abnormality is linearly related to the severity of hypertrophy, but is independent from a persistent myocardial ischemia. The recent report from the Zhang lab of quantitatively measuring myocardial ATP hydrolysis rate in the in vivo heart using NMR spectroscopy has had a significant impact on the field of bioenergetics in vivo, not only to the cardiovascular sciences, but also to other important organ systems.

In the past two decades, the Zhang lab’s active research areas have involved cell therapy for myocardial repair using autologous, allogenic adult stem cells, or human pluripotent stem cell (PSC) derived cardiac cells, and large-animal models of severe left-ventricular dysfunction with or without ischemic coronary artery disease. Dr. Zhang’s lab has been designing and fabricating myocardial tissue patches to examine the mechanisms and the functional outcomes of myocardial contractile-, bioenergetic-, and gene/protein expression changes in hearts receiving different types of cell transplantation (adult progenitor cells or iPSC-derivatives) using tissue engineering and molecular biochemistry tools.