Over ten years ago, the Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research (TRCHR) set out to put engineers, biologists, and clinicians in the same room and see what happens when they take on heart failure together. Dr. Craig Simmons was chosen to lead that effort. A University of...
A person walks into an emergency department with heart failure. Within hours, a doctor must make a consequential call to send them home or admit them to the hospital. Both options run their own risks – admitting the patient can lead to an unnecessary hospitalization...
For researchers studying heart disease, lab-grown heart cells are an essential tool. Created from human stem cells, they offer a powerful way to model disease, test therapies, and better understand heart function. However, the challenge remains that these cells behave...
For children living with cardiomyopathy, heart failure is not always caused by the heart losing its ability to pump. In many cases, the problem is more subtle, but just as serious: the heart becomes stiff and struggles to relax and fill properly between beats. This...
New findings from the UNEARTH CVD research team have shed light on an important but often overlooked aspect of cardiovascular care: the cognitive health of people living with heart failure. Published in Cureus, this new publication is the first study to examine...
The Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research is proud to celebrate an extraordinary milestone in the career of Dr. Paul Santerre, who has been elected as a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), the highest honour bestowed upon academic inventors. This...
Times and speakers subject to change.
KEYNOTE: Bench-to-Bedside Pipeline Through the Lens of Surgeon-Scientists
Marcelo Cypel, University Health Network
Adult Donation after Circulatory Death (DCD)
Seyed Alireza Rabi, University Health Network
Pigs & Peds – Translational Discoveries in Pediatric Donation after Circulatory Death and Pharmacologic Cardio-Protection During Long-Duration Congenital Heart Surgery
Mimi Deng, The Hospital for Sick Children
Who Shapes the Translation Pathway? A Systematic Analysis of Stakeholder Dynamics in Cardiac Stem Cell Translation
Samah Hassan, University Health Network
KEYNOTE: Precision Health. A Holistic Approach Towards Individualized Medicine.
Ronald Cohn, SickKids
Modernizing Genomic Medicine and Cardiac Care
Raymond Kim, SickKids
Distinct Forms of Dilated Cardiomyopathy Converge on TBX15-Mediated Metabolic Repression
Paul Delgado-Olguin, SickKids
Updating the Emergency Heart Failure Mortality Risk Grade for Mortality Prediction in Acute Heart Failure
Karem Abdul-Samad, University Health Network
KEYNOTE: Mitochondrial Transplantation as a Therapeutic Strategy
James McCully, Boston’s Children Hospital
Mitochondrial Therapeutics in Tissue Regeneration and repair: The MitoRevolution
Ana Andreazza, University of Toronto
Macrophage-Mediated Mitochondrial Clearance in Tissue Injury and Repair
Slava Epelman, University Health Network
Innovations in Pediatric HCM Care: The SCOUT-HCM Trial of Mavacamten
Seema Mital, SickKids
Redefining Amyloidosis: Novel Therapies and the Future of Treatment
Diego Delgado, University Health Network
One Target or Two? SGLT2 vs. SGLT1/2 Inhibitors in Heart Failure
Natasha Aleksova, University Health Network
Emerging and Novel Therapies in Hypertension
Paula Harvey, Women’s College Hospital
KEYNOTE: From Digital Signals to Clinical Evidence: Where AI Meets HI?
Adrian Hernandez, Duke University
Remote Monitoring of Heart Failure with Smart Watches vs. Other Devices
Darshan Brahmbhatt, University Health Network
Wearable Innovation & Equity
Azadeh Yadollahi, University Health Network
The Digital Guardrail in Cardiomyopathy: Practicing What we Prescribe
Áine Lynch, Columbia University
Prof. Cheng is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto in the Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Trained as an electrical engineer, she worked in industry on synthetic aperture radar surveillance before completing her PhD in Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto and spending the next decade at SickKids as an MRI physicist. She joined the university in 2014, where she expanded her suite of quantitative physiological MRI capabilities to target cardiovascular disease. Her current research is focused on real-time MRI, chemistry for molecular imaging, and early diagnostics for heart failure.
Dr. Matthias G. Friedrich earned his MD at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen/Nuernberg, Germany. He completed his training as an internist and cardiologist at the Charité University Medicine Center, Humboldt University in Berlin. He is currently a full professor at the Departments of Medicine and Diagnostic Radiology and acts as Chief of Cardiovascular Imaging and Scientific Director of the Courtois Cardiovascular Signature Program at the McGill University Health Centre. He also has an appointment with the Department of Medicine at Heidelberg University in Germany. He has focused the research activities of his team of 20+ researchers on cardiac MRI of myocardial injury, including acute ischemic and inflammatory conditions.
Dr. Milica Radisic is a Professor at the University of Toronto, Tier I Canada Research Chair and a Senior Scientist at the Toronto General Research Institute. She is also the Associate Editor for ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering, the Director of the NSERC CREATE Training Program in Organ-on-a-Chip Engineering and Entrepreneurship and a co-Founder and co-Director of CRAFT. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada-Academy of Science, Canadian Academy of Engineering, AIMBE and TERMIS. The long term objective of her research is to enable cardiovascular regeneration through tissue engineering and development of new biomaterials. Her research findings were presented in over 260 publications with h-index of 68 and over 18,500 citations. She is a co-founder of two companies TARA Biosystems, that uses human engineered heart tissues in drug development and safety testing, and Quthero that advances regenerative hydrogels.
Scientific Lead, Cardiac Precision Medicine Program
Dr. Seema Mital is a Heart Failure and Transplant Cardiologist and Head of Cardiovascular Research at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto. She is Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Toronto and a Senior Scientist at the SickKids Research Institute. She is also the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada / Robert M Freedom Chair of Cardiovascular Science, and Scientific Lead of the Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research. Mital has a strong translational research program focused on genomics, pharmacogenomics and stem cell applications to model childhood heart disease and discover new therapies. She has extensive experience in the genetics/genomics of congenital heart disease and heart failure, personalized medicine and clinical trials. She established the SickKids Heart Centre Biobank, a multi-centre biorepository of children and adults with childhood onset heart disease for genomics research, one of the largest international repositories of its kind. Mital is the Principal Investigator of the CIHR-funded INSERT-HCM multi-centre project aimed at implementing digital health technology, the NIH-funded Pediatric Heart Network for clinical trials, and leads the international ERAPerMed funded PROCEED network for Personalized Genomics in congenital heart disease.