Sasha (Oleksandr) Dmytrenko

 Sasha graduated from St. Olaf College in 2017 with a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry and is currently an MD-PhD student in the Immunology Program at Washington University School of Medicine co-mentored by Drs. Kory Lavine and Michael Diamond. He is interested in innate immune response and signaling in sterile and infectious disease processes. In his thesis work, Sasha explores the role of direct cardiac infection in cardiovascular manifestations of COVID-19. Using a combination of stem cell- and patient-derived in vitro models, cardiomyocytes and cardiac pericytes have been found to be susceptible to infection by SARS-CoV-2. Current efforts focus on elucidating consequences of this infection in vitro and in vivo using a murine model of cardiac-restricted SARS-CoV-2 infection. Outside of lab, Sasha enjoys exploring the outdoors by bike, cooking, photography, and reading. 

Publications 

Brumback BD*, Dmytrenko O*, Robinson AN, Bailey AB, Ma P, Liu J, Hicks SC, Ng S, Li G, Zhang D, Lipovsky CE, Lin C, Diamond MS, Lavine KJ†, Rentschler SL†. Human Cardiac Pericytes are Susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 Infection. JACC Basic Transl Sci, accepted 

Ying B, Scheaffer SM, Whitener B, Liang CY, Dmytrenko O, Mackin S, Wu K, Lee D, Avena LE, Chong Z, Case JB, Ma L, Kim TTM, Sein CE, Woods A, Berrueta DM, Chang GY, Stewart-Jones G, Renzi I, Lai YT, Malinowski A, Carfi A, Elbashir SM, Edwards DK, Thackray LB, Diamond MS. 2022 Boosting with variant-matched or historical mRNA vaccines protects against Omicron infection in mice. Cell, 185(9):1572-1587.e11. 

Dmytrenko O, Lavine KJ. 2022 Cardiovascular Tropism and Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 Infection. Viruses, 14(6):1137. 

Wong NR, Mohan J, Kopecky BJ, Guo S, Du L, Leid J, Feng G, Lokshina I, Dmytrenko O, Luehmann H, Bajpai G, Ewald L, Bell L, Patel N, Bredemeyer A, Weinheimer CJ, Nigro JM, Kovacs A, Morimoto S, Bayguinov PO, Fisher MR, Stump WT, Greenberg M, Fitzpatrick JAJ, Epelman S, Kreisel D, Sah R, Liu Y, Hu H, Lavine KJ. 2021 Resident cardiac macrophages mediate adaptive myocardial remodeling. Immunity, 54(9):2072-2088.e7. 

Bailey AL*, Dmytrenko O*, Greenberg L*, Bredemeyer AL, Ma P, Liu J, Penna V, Winkler ES, Sviben S, Brooks E, Nair AP, Heck KA, Rali AS, Simpson L, Saririan M, Hobohm D, Stump WT, Fitzpatrick JA, Xie X, Zhang X, Shi PY, Hinson JT, Gi WT, Schmidt C, Leuschner F, Lin CY, Diamond MS†, Greenberg MJ†, Lavine KJ†. 2021 SARS-CoV-2 Infects Human Engineered Heart Tissues and Models COVID-19 Myocarditis. JACC Basic Transl Sci, 6(4):331-345.