Biennial UC Davis Cardiovascular Symposium
Cardiovascular diseases, including arrhythmias, heart failure (HF), hypertension, and stroke are the number one killer in the developed world for both men and women. To develop better and more effective therapies to combat cardiovascular diseases, it is critically important for scientists and physicians to gain more accurate and deeper understanding of the mechanisms that underlie heart and vascular function and dysfunction. In recent decades, researchers have made important conceptual advances and accumulated a large body of experimental cardiovascular functional data at molecular, cellular, and whole organ levels. However, there is a critical need to integrate these data into mechanistic and quantitative models to understand emergent properties of complex biological systems —such as arrhythmias and vasospasms— that are often counterintuitive due to non-linear dynamics interactions. Quantitative model predictions test the depth of our knowledge, guide new experimenta¬tion, and provide strategies for rational design of novel therapeutic approaches.
In order to facilitate and foster interdisciplinary research on cardiovascular disease mechanisms, we bring together leading experimentalists and mathematical modelers in this series of interactive conferences. The emphases are on summarizing current state of research in the focus area, identifying consensus & controversy (where more investigation is needed), giving experimentalists access to modeling tools and modelers a deeper understanding of the data that must drive their models, and connecting the cardiac and vascular communities. Each conference in this series presents an important research area that can benefit greatly from combining experimental studies with mathematical modeling and integrating with other areas. Together, these conferences will cover topics that are essential for understanding cardiovascular disease mechanisms at multi-scale levels from molecular to cellular to the whole organ and to patients.