As one of the limited highly select centers in the United States participating in the clinical trial program of the HeartMate 3™ centrifugal-flow chronic left ventricular assist system, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) Heart & Vascular Center was among the first to implant this potentially game-changing technology in mechanical circulatory support.
This year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave the go-ahead to broaden enrollment of the U.S. clinical trial to include more than 1,000 patients at up to 60 clinical sites. Mandeep R. Mehra, MD, Executive Director of the Center for Advanced Heart Disease and Medical Director of the Heart & Vascular Center, is one of four national principal investigators leading the trial and chair of the publications and presentations committee. Read more.
Three years ago, Christine Seidman, MD, Director of the Cardiovascular Genetics Center, and colleagues were the first to sequence the behemoth titin gene responsible for encoding the largest protein in the human body. They discovered that mutations truncating titin are the most common genetic cause of severe and familial dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) (N Engl J Med 2012;366:619-28). Read more.
Cardiomyopathy experts in the Cardiovascular Genetics Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital are leading an international trial investigating benefits of therapy given in early hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM).
“Current therapy for HCM only palliates symptoms,” said Carolyn Y. Ho, MD, Medical Director of the Cardiovascular Genetics Center. “We are continuing our efforts to find ways to change the course of HCM by providing therapy early in the disease process with the ultimate goal of preventing HCM from developing at all.” Read more.
Cardiomyopathy experts in the Cardiovascular Genetics Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital are leading an international trial investigating benefits of therapy given in early hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). The multicenter trial aims to alter the course of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and offers a targeted approach to sarcomere mutation carriers.
“Current therapy for HCM only palliates symptoms,” said Carolyn Y. Ho, MD, Medical Director of the Cardiovascular Genetics Center. “We are continuing our efforts to find ways to change the course of HCM by providing therapy early in the disease process with the ultimate goal of preventing HCM from developing at all.” Read more.
At the November 2016 American Heart Association Scientific Sessions in New Orleans, Mandeep R. Mehra, MD, Executive Director of the Center for Advanced Heart Disease and Medical Director of the Heart & Vascular Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, announced groundbreaking results of the first primary endpoint from the MOMENTUM 3 clinical trial. The results were published simultaneously online in the New England Journal of Medicine and will appear in a future issue of the publication. Read more.
Vascular surgeons at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) are at the forefront of several trials of a novel tissue-engineered vascular conduit that may alleviate challenges seen with synthetic vascular grafts and autologous vessels.
“This is the first truly bioengineered vessel that has reached this stage of clinical development for vascular use,” according to Michael Belkin, MD, Chief of the Division of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery. “We are hopeful that the vessel will demonstrate advantages over the currently available treatment options for patients with PAD and ESRD.” Read more.
Based on groundbreaking research using zebrafish models, Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) investigators, led by Ronglih Liao, PhD, in collaboration with Calum A. MacRae, MD, PhD, Chief of Cardiovascular Medicine, and Rodney H. Falk, MD, Director of the BWH Cardiac Amyloidosis Program, are introducing novel approaches to address the underlying pathogenesis of AL amyloidosis. Read more.
In a significant discovery, a team of clinicians and basic science researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) identified molecules responsible for the metabolic underpinnings of pulmonary hypertension (PH) and confirmed their hypothesis in a patient with previously undiagnosed exercise-induced PH.
“Currently, therapy for pulmonary hypertension is used to extend survival and palliate symptoms, with most of the focus at the end stages of disease,” said Stephen Y. Chan, MD, PhD, lead author of the study. “But, very little is known about the initiating molecular triggers for this disease. We believe that discoveries in this regard would constitute a major advance in our goals to design more effective methods to alter or prevent PH.” Read more.
At the 64th Annual Scientific Session of the American College of Cardiology (ACC), Marc S. Sabatine, MD, MPH, Chairman of the Thrombolysis in Myocardial Infarction (TIMI) Study Group and Lewis Dexter, MD, Distinguished Chair in Cardiovascular Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), presented two late-breaking clinical trials. In both studies the experimental therapy significantly reduced cardiovascular events in the studied patient populations. Read more.
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