HCM Pills Episode 4 Professor Jolanda van der Velden

HCM Pills is a series of webcasts organized by the HCM Patient Foundation. The purpose of the webcast is to ask the most burning questions of patients to world-renowned HCM experts who reply to them in a clear and understandable way.

Our fourth guest, Prof. Jolanda van der Velden, is the Chair of the Department of Physiology at the Amsterdam University Medical Center, and director of the Amsterdam Cardiovascular Sciences Institute. Her main research interest is the role of sarcomeric proteins in cardiac performance. As mutations in sarcomeric proteins are a frequent cause of heart disease, research on inherited cardiomyopathies is a central research line in Amsterdam UMC. Prof. van der Velden’s team at the Physiology department collaborates with clinical geneticists, cardiologists, cardiac surgeons and experts in in vivo cardiac imaging, enabling translational studies from bench to the patient. Their expertise includes functional studies at single cardiac muscle cell and multicellular level, and mitochondrial studies in patient samples obtained during cardiac surgery, and stem cell-derived heart models.

The anchor of HCM Pills is Dr. Niccolo' Maurizi, Chief Resident in Cardiology at CHUV | Lausanne university. Prior to that, he worked as a Researcher at Università degli Studi di Firenze. He co-founded D-Heart, a startup for innovative cardiologic wearable concepts in 2015. He has authored and co-authored almost 100 scientific articles with concentration on HCM-related issues (sudden cardiac arrest management, pregnancy in HCM, smart devices in clinical practice, etc.). Niccolo' will be asking all questions of HCM patients to our patients.