Dr. Keith Horvath directs cardiothoracic surgery for the National Institutes of Health’s Heart Center at Suburban Hospital. The center celebrated its first anniversary this summer.
How does the heart center work? How does it function in the community?
Suburban and the NIH together wanted to have such a facility and the way to achieve it was to do it in a collaborative fashion. … The whole point is to have translational research so that there are things that we learn at the NIH that we then immediately carry over to help improve patient care at Suburban.
What kind of research is going on at the NIH?
We have three different projects over there. We are injecting stem cells into hearts and seeing their regenerative capacity and seeing their ability to improve the function of hearts that … are not getting enough blood flow. Another project is using MRI [magnetic resonance imaging] guidance to operate on the heart. In this case, what we’re doing is putting in an aortic valve using … imaging as what I see. I’m not opening the chest and stopping the heart to put the valve in. … What would normally take about threeor four hours in a standard operating room we’re doing that in about 90 seconds.
Is that being performed now?
That’s not being performed yet at Suburban. These are all things that are close to being able to move from one side of the street to the other. The third [research project] is … what we call xenotransplantation. We’re actually taking pig hearts and transplanting them into baboons with the intent that sometime in the future we will actually be able to transplant pig hearts into humans.
How did you get interested in medicine?
I went to college thinking I was going to be a chemical engineer. I did that actually for a summer and found that, while it was interesting, there was absolutely no contact with people. Most of the science I’d learned kept me from blowing up the laboratory.
