For more than 25 years, Dan Roden, M.D., has tried to figure out what causes arrhythmias - abnormal heart rhythms - and why drug treatment doesn't work in every patient.

Today he and his colleagues at Vanderbilt University Medical Center are closer than ever to cracking these mysteries, thanks in part to their involvement in “big science” projects at the national and international levels. 

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Heart specialists at the Johns Hopkins Heart Institute have been awarded more than $1.5 million from the France-based Leducq Foundation Trans-Atlantic Network of Excellence to study the genetic origins of sudden cardiac death. An estimated 1 million Americans or more die each year from sudden heart attacks, a third of them due to disturbingly fast and abnormal heartbeats that wreck the heart's normal electrical rhythms.

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We are pleased to announce that Darshan Dalal was the recipient of a Leducq Fondation Young Investigator Fellowship working with the Amsterdam Center starting in November 2008. Dr. Dalal had worked for the past two years within the Johns Hopkins Leducq Center as part of the Alliance Against Sudden Cardiac Death Network, and as a member of Reynolds Clinical Cardiovascular Research Center. Dr. Dalal has become an important member of the research team working to identify genetic markers that convey enhanced susceptibility to sudden cardic death, and has been one of the principals involved in conducting genetic analyses on the large scale genotyping effort that was successfully carried out within the network this past year.

Dr. Darshan has some relatively unique qualifications that made him an excellent candidate for this Fellowship. He earned an M.D. degree in India and has most recently been pursuing a PhD degree in clinical epidemiology, with special emphasis on genetic epidemiology, here at Hopkins within our Bloomberg School of Public Health. He expects to finish that degree this summer having conducted his thesis research on the clinical and genetic analysis of the ICD patient population that is the central patient resource in the Hopkins Leducq program.

His interest in working with the Amsterdam Center would continue those interests and provide an excellent opportunity for him to extend this work with some of the best investigators and populations in the world. We believe that this is an excellent opportunity for Dr. Dalal to further his training, be highly productive by virtue of his prior experience, and able to make unique contributions facilitating interactions between the two centers. He would thus be in an excellent position to leverage the patient resources and expertise available on both sides of the Atlantic, furthering the goals for which our Network was established.