University of Szeged

Istvan Baczko (PhD)

Dr. Baczkó has been involved in cardiovascular basic research for more than 28 years at the University of Szeged, Hungary, and spent 5 years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, and University of Calgary, Canada. His research interests include cardiac cellular electrophysiology with special attention to repolarization and repolarization reserve, atrial fibrillation, sudden cardiac death, electrophysiology of the athlete’s heart, electrical remodelling of the heart in pathological settings, including heart failure and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. He has published 97 papers in the field so far, with a H-index of 31 and more than 2700 citations. He has been involved in more than 25 national and international research projects as PI or senior participant, including EU FP6 and 7 projects.

Our group has a unique access to human hearts from general donors that were not used for transplantation due to logistical reasons („healthy” human hearts). In addition, we have a limited access to explanted human heart from patients with end-stage heart failure. These opportunities allow us to test the interaction of LCE-based contractile materials created within the consortium with human cardiac tissue. In addition, we will test the possible proarrhythmic adverse effects of application of these LCE –based biomimetic materials in different animal models of proarrhythmi in both in vivo and in vitro settings, including the use of a 64-channel state-of-the-art mapping setup.