Grant to aid medical professor’s research

Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2000 | 9:32 a.m.

The school announced on Tuesday it is receiving a $9.24 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for work that could lead to the development of new drugs to fight heart disease.

The grant comes out of Dr. Joseph Hume's 1989 discovery of protein in the human heart that conducts negatively charged electricity.

It's been known for some time that proteins in cell membranes transport ions across the heart. That's the electric current flow that allows electrocardiograms to monitor hearts with a beep and an electronic spike to signal heart beats.

Many of the medicines used to treat abnormal heart rhythm or arrhythmia target this positive electric flow.

In 1989, Hume of the medical school's department of Physiology and Cell Biology found a new class of proteins that carry negatively charged ions like chloride.

Just like current medicines treat the positive ion flow, there could be new medicines to treat the negative ion flow.

"What this program allows now is really to allow us to expand this investigation," Hume said.

Among the issues that will be studied in the four-year program are investigating the gene that makes the protein that enable the chloride channels and looking at people natural born with defects in these genes and how that might tie into heart disease.