Physician scientist Gordon Tomaselli, an expert on
sudden cardiac death and heart rhythm
disturbances, has been named director of the Johns Hopkins
University School of Medicine's Division
of Cardiology and co-director of the school's Heart and
Vascular Institute.
Tomaselli, who has been at Johns Hopkins for more than
two decades, succeeds Eduardo
Marban, who had led the division since 2002 and will remain
active as adjunct faculty. He also
succeeds Marban as the Michel Mirowski, M.D., Professor of
Cardiology.
Tomaselli, 53, a cardiac electrophysiologist, has
focused most of his research efforts on
arrhythmias, and especially on new therapies aimed at
warding off the potentially fatal heart
condition. More than 300,000 Americans suddenly die each
year when the heart stops pumping blood,
triggered by an electrical disturbance in the heart.
In addition to his new roles, Tomaselli will continue
as co-director of the Donald W. Reynolds
Cardiovascular Clinical Research Center at Johns Hopkins,
funded in 2003 to carry out research into
the causes of sudden cardiac death.
Specifically, Tomaselli and his team are testing
better ways of predicting who benefits from
implanted cardiac defibrillators, which briefly shock the
heart to correct errant heart rhythms.
Though an estimated 2 million Americans, many of them
elderly, have implanted cardiac defibrillators,
no more than 20 percent of the devices ever need to fire a
shock, and the goal is to be able to predict
which patients can benefit most from the surgically
invasive and costly procedure. Also part of the
research agenda expected under Tomaselli's leadership are
early detection of arrhythmia using
imaging and genetic screening, and the use of stem cell
technology to treat tissue damaged by heart
attack or cardiac arrest.
"This is a tremendous appointment for Hopkins and for
Dr. Tomaselli, who has already made his
mark at Hopkins by establishing himself and the School of
Medicine as a world leader in the study of
causes and potential therapies to prevent sudden cardiac
death," said Myron Weisfeldt, physician in
chief at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and a professor and
director of the Department of Medicine at
the school. "Gordon Tomaselli knows firsthand how the
Hopkins experience helped him to develop as a
global leader in the field, and he is poised to build on
these insights and his active involvement with
the American Heart Association to inspire the next
generation of physician scientists."
The author of more than 150 articles and many book
chapters on various aspects of arrhythmia,
Tomaselli has investigated how so-called ion-channel
proteins regulate the flow of electrically charged
molecules into and out of heart muscle cells. His research
has tied ion-channel disturbances to certain
types of heart disease and shown that they can cause
electrical instability in the body's main pumping
organ, creating rapid and often lethal arrhythmias, which
can lead to cardiac arrest and sudden death.
For the last two years, Tomaselli served as program
chair for the American Heart Association's
Scientific Sessions, the world's premier conference for
cardiologists. He is currently chairman of the
association's 2010-2013 Strategic Planning Task Force.
Tomaselli also remains an active member of the
American College of Cardiology and serves on
the board of directors of the Heart Rhythm Society.
As head of the Johns Hopkins Division of Cardiology,
Tomaselli will lead a group of 713 people,
including 102 faculty and 87 fellows, who treat more than
4,000 inpatients a year. He will also oversee
an annual research budget of nearly $40 million, one of the
largest at Johns Hopkins, with major
research initiatives under way in heart failure; cardiac
imaging; regenerative medicine with stem cells;
inherited, genetic heart disorders; and myocardial biology
and heart cell signaling.
The division Tomaselli inherits has earned national
and international acclaim, Weisfeldt said, and
has been consistently ranked by U.S. News & World Report
among the top four in cardiology among
American academic medical centers.
Tomaselli earned his undergraduate degree in
biochemistry and chemistry in 1977 from the
State University of New York at Buffalo and his medical
degree in 1982 from Albert Einstein College
of Medicine. He completed his medical training and
residency at the University of California, San
Francisco in 1985. Tomaselli began his career in the UCSF
Cardiovascular Research Institute as a
research fellow, before moving to the fellowship program at
the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in
1986 and joining the faculty three years later. Since then,
he has received numerous awards and
served on a variety of boards and committees. From 2003 to
2005, Tomaselli was president of the
Cardiac Electrophysiology Society.
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