By: Ada Chong
July 2023
As part of Dr. Itzhaki’s family history, cardiac arrhythmia has nourished her curiosity and passion for electrophysiology research from the early stages of her academic path, starting with her Master’s studies in Biomedical Engineering. As part of her PhD research at the Technion, she had the opportunity to take part in pioneering translational electrophysiology research in the field of human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) disease modeling as the field emerged. As a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, leveraging on her stem cell electrophysiology expertise, she turned to the field of sex differences and sex hormones, interrogating the effect of the female hormone estrogen on cardiac arrhythmic propensity.
At Emory University, as part of the Division of Children’s Heart Center and the HeRO Center, she will continue to focus on age (ranging from birth, adolescence, through adulthood) and sex-differences with respect to sex hormones in cardiovascular health and disease. She will specifically focus on their impact on the initiation and termination of cardiac arrhythmias, with the intent of contributing to clinical risk stratification and the derivation of new antiarrhythmic therapeutic options for the management of female and male pediatric and adult long QT syndrome patients, specifically, and arrhythmia-susceptible congenital disease patients, in general.
Dr. Itzhaki finds the long QT syndrome to be one of the most interesting arrhythmia-susceptible congenital diseases to study using the iPSC platform. The long QT syndrome is the most common and often fatal inherited channelopathy and the most commonly recognized cause of sudden cardiac death in children. The proarrhythmic symptoms exhibited by long QT syndrome patients at bedside are recapitulated as a very clear measurable electrophysiological signature at the cellular level in patient-specific iPSC-cardiomyocytes in the dish at bench side in a personalized manner. Thus, Dr. Itzhaki plans to use this cellular model in a translational bedside-to-bench-to-bedside manner to contribute to the study of the syndrome’s disease mechanism, interrogate sex hormones’ effects on arrhythmic propensity, identify molecular therapeutic targets, support drug repurposing efforts, and help develop new antiarrhythmic therapeutic options. Dr. Itzhaki is excited to take advantage of this disease- and patient-specific cellular platform using gold standard and high throughput multiparametric electrophysiology recording and calcium imaging technologies.
Since such translational research requires a multidisciplinary approach, Dr. Itzhaki finds the collaborative environment at Emory to be an invaluable privilege. She says, “I love that basic scientists, biomedical engineers, and clinicians work so closely together at Emory. When you have such talented people putting their minds and different perspectives together, beautiful things can come about, and research creativity can be elevated to the next level.”