Heart Disease: Basic Cardiovascular Research Laboratory

The Basic Cardiovascular Research Laboratory was founded in 1973 by Dr. Leonard S. Dreifus, past president of the American College of Cardiology. Through the years of the leadership of Drs. Dreifus and Kowey, the laboratory has developed into one of the finest cardiovascular research laboratories of its size worldwide.

Our laboratory focuses on exploring the mechanisms responsible for sudden cardiac death under various clinical conditions, including life-threatening rapid and irregular heart beats, myocardial infarction (“heart attack”), enlarged and weakened heart. The cardiovascular studies, from the organ to a single isolated cardiac cell, have contributed a great deal to our understanding of normal electrophysiology as well as electrical disturbances in heart disease. Recently, the lab has started a new project to inject bone marrow cells into heart for repairing weakened heart muscles.

An animal ventricular wedge preparation which I developed has received a great deal of attention and has been adopted by many universities and pharmaceutical companies worldwide. This wedge preparation possesses many advantages over traditional methods to study electrical signals traveling within the heart. From the wedge preparation, three separate floating microelectrodes are used to record the signals in the outer, mid and inner regions of the heart. The experimental findings based on the ventricular wedge model have led to several fundamental changes in our thinking as to the origin and maintenance of normal as well as abnormal heart rhythms.

Selected Publications

Yan GX, Joshi A, Guo D, Hlaing T, Martin J, Xu X, Kowey PR. (2004). Phase 2 reentry as a trigger to initiate ventricular fibrillation during early acute myocardial ischemia. Circulation 110: 1036-1041.

Xu X, Yan GX, Wu Y, Liu T, Kowey PR. (2003). Electrophysiologic effects of SB-237376: a new antiarrhythmic compound with dual potassium and calcium channel blocking action. J. Cardiovasc. Pharmacol. 41: 414-421.

Yan, G.X., Rials, S., Wu, Y., Liu, T., Xu, X., Marinchak, R., Kowey, P.R. (2001). Ventricular hypertrophy amplifies transmural repolarization dispersion and induces after depolarization. Amer. J. Physiol. Heart Circ. Physiol. 281: H1968-H1975

Yan GX, Wu Y, Liu T, Wang J, Marinchak RA, Kowey PR. (2001). Phase 2 early afterdepolarization as a trigger of polymorphic ventricular tachycardia in acquired long-QT syndrome : direct evidence from intracellular recordings in the intact left ventricular wall. Circulation 103: 2851-2856.