New ways to treat cardiac diseases could be found in the hearts of snakes.

The University of Colorado and a Boulder biotechnology company will use Burmese pythons — which dramatically pump up their heart size for a short time after gulping down their prey — as models to explore new ways to treat cardiac diseases.

Hiberna Corp., a Boulder-based company, has signed an agreement with CU’s Technology Transfer Office and will receive $100,000 from the university for the effort. Hiberna has licensed technology developed by CU professor Leslie Leinwand based on the natural ability of pythons to increase their heart size by up to 60 percent and speed their metabolism 40-fold after feeding.

The ability of pythons to enlarge and then decrease their heart muscles in just days could help scientists find new drugs to treat cardiac growth that comes in response to disease.

“This may be a unique path toward potential drug development,” Leinwand said. “If we are able to understand the genetic cues involved in rapid python heart muscle increases and decreases, that to me says there is the potential to develop therapeutics for humans.”

For human hearts, it’s good when they enlarge because of exercise, said Leinwand, who studies genetic heart defects. But heart enlargement from high blood pressure is unhealthy, she said.

Leinwand is a professor in CU’s molecular, cellular and developmental biology department and director of the CU Cardiovascular Institute.

She has studied hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, or HCM, a genetic disease marked by a thickening of heart muscle related to a weakness in muscle fibers that causes them to work harder to pump blood and consequently enlarge. HCM occurs in one in 500 people in the United States, and it’s the most common cardiac cause of sudden death in young athletes.

Two years ago, Leinwand was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute professor, one of 20 faculty members nationwide to receive a four-year, $1 million undergraduate education award from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Md.

As part of her proposal to enhance science education at CU’s Boulder campus, she launched an undergraduate laboratory research program known as the “Python Project.” CU undergraduates working with Leinwand have been studying the genome of the Burmese python, searching out and analyzing particular genes they suspect may be involved in the rapid heart-muscle changes.

Leinwand is a co-founding scientist of Hiberna along with professor Sandy Martin of the CU-Denver School of Medicine’s molecular biology department.