New research center to focus on cardiac safety and ... ( The University of Rochester Medical ...)

New research center to focus on cardiac safety and innovation

Date:11/11/2009

The University of Rochester Medical Center has announced the creation of a new center that will assist researchers studying the electrical activity of the heart with the goal of improving drug safety, understanding cardiac arrhythmias, and developing new electrocardiograph technologies. The Center for Quantitative Electrocardiology and Cardiac Safety funded by a $2.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health brings together an international network of academic researchers, pharmaceutical and medical device companies, and government regulators.

"Cardiac toxicity is one of the leading causes of removal of drugs from the market," said University of Rochester biomedical engineer Jean-Philippe Couderc, Ph.D., the director of the new Center. "The goal of this initiative is to foster collaboration on an international scale and support research that will ultimately improve cardiac safety."

The new Center will focus on developing novel methods and new technologies to evaluate electrocardiographs (ECG) for the purposes of predicting cardiac arrhythmias. The Center's unique resources will help scientists better understand heart disease and determine whether or not experimental drugs are toxic to the heart. Sudden cardiac arrest is one of the leading causes of death and many of these incidents are drug-related either caused by the drugs themselves or because a drug triggered a predisposition to lethal cardiac arrhythmias.

In 2004, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched the Critical Path Initiative, an effort to accelerate the process of bringing medical breakthroughs to patients while at the same time ensuring safety and reducing drug development costs. One of the goals of this initiative was to develop better ways to determine a drug's potential cardiac toxicity before it is brought to market. The FDA requires a thorough analysis of the impact of experimental drugs on cardiac activity, but it is acknowledged that cu
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Contact: Mark Michaud
mark_michaud@urmc.rochester.edu
585-273-4790
University of Rochester Medical Center
Source:Eurekalert

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