Less of a shock
Two scientists at Washington University have developed a low-energy defibrillation
scheme that significantly reduces the energy needed to re-establish a
normal rhythm in the heart’s main chambers. They hope this
electrotherapy will be much less painful than the existing electrotherapy, making treatment with a defibrillator much more acceptable to patients.
Washington People: Igor Efimov
Raised in a secret town in Siberia and trained in control theory for ICBM guidance, Igor Efimov, the Lucy & Stanley Lopata Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, wouldn’t be working at WUSTL had the Soviet Union not broken up immediately after he defended his dissertation in biophysics, providing him an opportunity to leave. His research specialty is disturbances of cardiac rhythm known as arrhythmias, electrical impulses that race around and around the heart instead of moving from one end of the heart to the other and then pausing before repeating.
New study calls into question reliance on animal models in cardiovascular research
Two recent research studies have found differences between the distribution of potassium-ion-channel variants in the mouse heart and in the human heart. In the mouse, the ion channels in the atria are different from those in the ventricles. In people there is no such chamber specificity. The difference is crucially important for the development of safe and effective cardiovascular drugs.
Efimov named Lopata Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Igor Efimov, Ph.D., was installed as the Lucy and Stanley Lopata Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science.