A Keynote in Winnipeg
Dr. Martin opened the second FASEB conference on the Hippo pathway with a talk on the regenerative capacity still latent in the human heart.
Fort Garry Hotel, Winnipeg, Canada | September 1–4, 2026 | #HippoSRC
Dr. Martin opens the meeting with the keynote lecture in the Fort Garry Hotel ballroom.
Earlier this month Dr. Martin traveled to Winnipeg to give the keynote address at the FASEB Science Research Conference on the Hippo Pathway in Biology and Disease, held September 1–4 at the historic Fort Garry Hotel. The meeting is only in its second outing, and it has become the place where the Hippo field gathers to argue about unpublished data.
Uncovering Latent Regeneration in Humans
Most of the conference program sits squarely in cancer biology, where Hippo signaling has become one of the most actively drugged pathways in oncology. Dr. Martin's keynote came at the question from the other direction. The same pathway that restrains overgrowth in tumors also holds the adult mammalian heart in a non-regenerative state, and the lab's long-running argument is that this restraint is a brake rather than a missing capacity. Release it in the right cells, at the right moment after injury, and cardiomyocytes that had stopped dividing can be coaxed back into renewal.
Presenting that work to a room of cancer biologists opened up a productive exchange. The tools being developed to shut Hippo signaling down in tumors are, in a sense, the inverse of what a failing heart needs, and the two communities have much to learn from each other about specificity, timing, and what happens when you push on this pathway in already stressed tissue.
The meeting
The conference was organized by:
Wenqi Wang, PhD | University of California, Irvine
Anwesha Dey, PhD | Genentech
Kun-Liang Guan, PhD | Westlake University
Kenneth Irvine, PhD | Waksman Institute, Rutgers University
Sessions ran from the mechanics of pathway regulation and the subcellular dynamics of Hippo signaling through to its crosstalk with other pathways, its role in stem cells and regeneration, its contribution to rare and pediatric cancers, and the practical business of drugging it. Alongside the science, the organizers ran a Meet the Expert workshop on the stories behind field-defining discoveries, and a career development workshop with senior investigators from academia and industry along with journal editors, covering job interviews, funding applications, and manuscript preparation.
For trainees, that combination is the real value of a small meeting: four days in one building with the people whose papers you have been reading, and enough unstructured time to actually talk to them.
Attendees of the 2026 FASEB Hippo Pathway in Biology and Disease conference.
Our thanks to Dr. Wang and the organizing committee for the invitation, and to everyone who made the trip to Winnipeg. Conference details are available at the FASEB event page.
The conference was supported by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R13CA294857. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
Photographs courtesy of Dr. Martin.