Edda Spiekerkoetter, MD

Edda Spiekerkoetter is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care, as well as a staff physician at Stanford Healthcare. Dr. Spiekerkoetter received her medical degree from the University of Freiburg, Germany and completed her Internal Medicine residency and Pulmonary and Critical Care fellowship at Hannover Medical School, Germany. Currently, 75% of her time is devoted to basic and translational research, 20% to clinical work as attending on the pulmonary hypertension service and 5% to teaching and directing the newly founded center of excellence for hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia (HHT) at Stanford.  She is passionate about building a translational research program at Stanford to understand the pathogenesis of pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), other vascular diseases such as HHT as well as right ventricular failure – the ultimate goal being to identify novel treatment targets and test therapies in clinical trials. Her biggest accomplishment to date has been to show that targeting the dysfunctional Bone Morphogenetic Protein receptor 2 (BMPR2) pathway is beneficial in PAH. She discovered that FK506 (Tacrolimus) activates BMPR2, identified its mechanism of action in the pulmonary vasculature and the right ventricle and translated it to the clinic by initiating and completing a clinical phase II trial.