The Kenny Gordon Experimental and
Computational Arrhythmia Laboratory
at the Weill Cornell Medical Center
Sudden cardiac death, primarily caused by ventricular arrhythmias, is a major public health problem – it is one of the leading causes of mortality, resulting in more than 350,000 annual deaths in the United States alone.
Progress Update – 2/11/19
The members of the Kenny Gordon Experimental and Computational Arrhythmia Laboratory are continuing to press forward to improve the understanding of what triggers cardiac arrhythmias and how we can prevent arrhythmia deaths.
In our laboratory, we use two main approaches – electrophysiology experiments and computer modeling. In both domains, we have pushed hard in the past couple of years to utilize cardiac cells derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Such cells enable us as biologists to experiment on human heart cells without having to rely on the very time-consuming and sporadic process of obtaining such cells directly from human hearts. This, in turn, allows us to push forward more rapidly. The findings from these experiments feed into our computer models, which enable us to look beyond the single cell into virtual hearts. Because lethal cardiac arrhythmias involve dynamics that initiate at the cellular level, but manifest at the whole-heart level, such computer models are helping us to bridge the gap between the laboratory and clinical reality.
We have made a number of important findings in the past couple of years. Most notably, we have shed light on the critical nature of the balance of particular ion channels in the heart (specifically, types of potassium channels). Better understanding the relative balance of such channels is valuable in understanding what can lead a heart to have an arrhythmia. At the same time, we are also utilizing iPSC derived cardiac cells to develop tests that can be used by the pharmaceutical industry to reveal when drugs they are developing might be a risk for accidentally triggering arrhythmias – something that is important for both pharma and patients.
These and other findings are featured in a number of our publications in scientific journals. Details of our projects can be found on our laboratory website at www.christinilab.org.
We would like to thank the Kenny Gordon Foundation for your invaluable support of our research efforts. With your help, we continue to make exciting progress in working to prevent and treat cardiac arrhythmias.