Toby Andrews

Cardiac development and plasticity

The heart has a highly specialised internal architecture that supports rhythmic contraction to drive blood flow through the peripheral circulation. This includes a complex layering of cell types within the heart wall, an electrical conduction system, and septa that partition the lumen into discrete chambers. These physical structures are initially shaped during embryonic development by intricate patterns of cell behaviour, but can further remodel over a lifetime in response to changes in animal environment and experience. This plasticity can yield functionally adaptive changes in form, while also contributing to the development of congenital and acquired structural defects. 

Our primary goal in the lab is to dissect the information that regulates cardiac form, how it is sensed and interpreted at the cellular level, and how it steers normal and pathological remodelling over different timescales. This is towards the long-term goal of identifying mechanisms of cardiac diversity across populations and species, and inspiring new approaches to diagnose and repair structural defects of the heart wall and septa.  

We use a range of experimental methods to address these questions, including advanced microscopy, morphometrics, transcriptomics, and gene editing. We use zebrafish as a primary model system, where optical transparency enables high-resolution imaging of cardiac development in live animals in real time, while calling on comparative approaches in other vertebrates to resolve inter-species differences and mechanisms of evolutionary diversity. 

Toby Andrews is an IDRM Transition Fellow affiliated with the Department of Paediatrics, based at the Institute of Developmental and Regenerative Medicine.

Toby obtained a BSc in Anatomy, Developmental and Human Biology from King’s College London. He then moved to Cambridge on a Wellcome Trust MPhil/PhD studentship in Developmental Mechanisms, where he developed quantitative imaging approaches to study the evolution of developmental mechanisms shaping the vertebrate body axis, working in the labs of Michael Akam and Ben Steventon (MPhil, 2016-17)  and Elia Benito-Gutierrez (PhD, 2017-2021). Toby then joined the Organ Morphodynamics Laboratory at The Francis Crick Institute, led by Rashmi Priya, where he investigated mechanical control of organ shape and size using the zebrafish as a model system. Toby joined the Institute of Developmental and Regenerative Medicine in 2025 to establish his lab within the cardiology theme.