Branco Weiss Fellow Since
2024
Research Category
Translational Medicine, Cardiology, Electrophysiology
Research Location
Department of Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Background
Heart diseases are a major cause of death, disability, and societal costs world-wide. Our current interventional treatments for heart failure and heart valve disease do not improve the symptoms in many patients, suggesting that we do not possess a satisfactory understanding of the disease mechanisms. This project intends to progress patient care by expanding mechanistic insights and develop a tool to aid clinical decision-making. It is known that the heart’s sparking (electrophysiology) impacts its pumping (mechanics). But also the mechanics influence electrophysiology. Interaction between electrophysiology and mechanics has mainly been studied within delimited and isolated parts of the heart. However, the atrial and ventricular heart chambers are tethered. Stretching of one chamber may pull or compress another, potentially altering its electrophysiology. Nevertheless, how whole-heart cross-talk between electrophysiology and mechanics influences disease is unknown.
Details of Research
By experiments on explanted pig hearts using a technology, allowing the hearts to pump blood, and clinical investigations in patients, this project aims to: 1) Scrutinize full-organ interaction between electrophysiology and mechanics to reach a whole-heart understanding of heart failure and valve disease. 2) Establish ways to attenuate disease-causing interaction between heart chambers in diseased hearts. 3) Develop an approach to assess whole-heart interplay of electrophysiology and mechanics in patients and design trials testing its use in decision-support for treatment.
The results have the potential to change our understanding of common heart diseases to involve the whole heart, thereby giving rise to a new era of therapy guided by full-organ assessment and targeting both atria and ventricles.
