Health and Medicine

Boyce Griffith and his team in the College of Arts and Sciences research and develop beating heart simulations, modeling the interactions of the heart’s fluid movement, physical structure and electrical system to improve both the prediction and treatment of heart conditions and the design of cardiac medical devices.

After a heart attack, every second counts. To increase a victim’s chance of survival, Tar Heels teamed up with NC State researchers to find a faster way to get an automatic external defibrillator to the scene of a heart attack. The answer, they learned, could be less running and more flying.

Heart disease is the No. 1 killer in the U.S. — but what if there was a way to regenerate healthy heart cells? Cue Li Qian, who developed a new method for altering the makeup of damaged heart cells in humans. Using viruses as their messenger, they can send a cocktail of carefully selected DNA into a heart’s scar tissue, where they trigger the conversion of fibroblasts into healthy muscle cells.