Research

Division of Cardiovascular Medicine:

 RESEARCH

• Research Grants
• Clinical Trials
• Michael Salerno: Heart MRI Test 
• Zhen Yan: Tool to Check Mitochondria

Cardiovascular research holds enormous promise for bringing innovative strategies to the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease. The division’s physicians and scientists seek a better understanding of the cellular and genetic underpinnings of cardiovascular disease, while actively participating in clinical trials to evaluate new treatment modalities. The division’s medical research buildings are close to UVA hospital, facilitating daily collaboration; a core group of research nurses coordinate the many ongoing clinical trials in the fields of cardiovascular imaging, interventional cardiology, and cardiac electrophysiology. The division’s laboratory facilities include:

• two state-of-the-art operating rooms: one sterile, for surgery on the chronic canine model and equipped with an ultrasound machine, gamma camera and fluoroscopy unit; the other nonsterile, for acute canine experiments using ultrasound;
• a non-sterile operating room for nuclear imaging, equipped with a two-head gamma camera;
• microscopy laboratory;
• wet laboratory for chemistry, histology, and in vitro studies.

Brian Annex’s UH3 grant evaluating the drug Zibotentan, manufactured by AstraZeneca, to determine its effectiveness against peripheral arterial disease, continued in its second year in FY2014. UVA is one of nine academic research institutions sharing $12.7 million in NIH funding to explore new uses for existing pharmaceutical compounds, an initiative led by the NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. Jamieson Bourque and Michael Salerno both had NIH career development (“K”) awards during FY2014, and Christopher Kramer’s T32 cardiovascular imaging training grant is one of only a handful of such grants in the U.S.