WIICT 2021: Cardiac Oriented Research (COR)

Cardiac arrhythmias affect to one in three adults: more than 10 million Europeans do suffer a cardiac arrhythmia. In 2021, almost 70% of heart arrhythmias cannot be cured, and they cost more than two hundred thousand millions of euros to the European Union each year. Nowadays, fundamental mechanisms of initiation and maintenance of arrhythmias remain unknow. Antiarrhythmic drugs fail in more than sixty percent of patients.
 
The goal of ITACA–COR research group is to achieve that cardiac arrhythmias become a curable disease. COR is a team of electronic and biomedical engineers developing technology to understand cardiac arrhythmias, to provide valuable tools to clinicians and to ensure that its knowledge arrives to all patients.
 
ITACA-COR collaborates with biologists in the development and characterization of human cell cultures from pluripotent stem cells. These cell cultures improve the understanding of the ionic currents interactions that affect cardiac tissue. These will be the target of novel biological antiarrhythmic treatments.
 
Today, all patients are receiving the same surgery, pulmonary vein isolation, although it fails in more than forty percent of cases. Closer to the patients, ITACA-COR also develops electrocardiographic imaging technology, studying regularization techniques that allow the estimation of the origin of the arrhythmia without the need of surgical interventions and applying machine learning techniques to predict the most appropriate treatment for each patient by putting together different clinical variable and electrophysiological information.