Thomas Hund, PhD has a collaborative approach to team science that promises to advance heart and lung research
By Beth Harvilla, Senior Writer Ohio State Wexner Medical Center
IT WAS their latest attempt.
Thomas Hund, PhD, a well-known heart researcher, was ready to rush downstairs to his lab and look through the data.
“Everybody knows that I’m very impatient,” he says to a group of researchers during his weekly lab meeting. “I want to be there to see if we’re wrong again or if we got it right.”
The research, which takes years to complete, is often incremental.
If researchers discover how the heart decodes cellular signals, it means treatment could be developed to offset stress from major heart diseases such as arrhythmia.
The team is focused on a project examining how a cellular channel that carries potassium in heart cells responds to stress.
“Ultimately, we’re targeting something up or downstream from that electrical signal in hopes that we can tune the heart’s response to improve performance,” Dr. Hund says.
Dr. Hund, a professor in internal medicine and biomedical engineering at The Ohio State University College of Medicine, spent decades studying how electricity powers heart cells with every beat.
Now he spends most of his time accelerating the research of others as the director and the William D. and Jacquelyn L. Wells Chair of The Ohio State University Dorothy M. Davis Heart and Lung Research Institute, which has more than 800 faculty, staff and trainees focused on finding new understanding of and treatments for heart and lung diseases.
