Kumaraswamy Nanthakumar

Research Synopsis

The most common cause of sudden cardiac death is ventricular fibrillation. Defibrillation by delivering high-energy shocks has been a successful way of treating this problem. However, providing this therapy to patients and successfully discharging them from the hospital have been a significant challenge. Moreover, patients for whom defibrillation can be offered can have significant issues of re-fibrillation; this interrupts resuscitation efforts, prolongs the period of time with no blood flowing to the brain, leading to a poor outcome. The patients that are treated currently with implantable devices only make up a small fraction of patients at risk who die annually from VF. This arrhythmia and the mechanism that maintains it in humans are difficult to study due to ethical concerns. The objective of my research program is to study and understand the electrical short circuit that maintains arrhythmias, and the mechanisms and factors that modulate them. My research specifically focuses on the modulation of cardiac arrhythmias in various ways, including the application of renal sympathetic denervation, metabolic modulator and RyR2 stabilizer.