Jonathan Silva
- Phone
314-935-8837 - Office
Whitaker Hall, Room 200G - Lab location
Whitaker Hall, Room 250 & 260
Google ScholarEducation
PhD, Washington University in St. Louis, 2008MS, Case Western Reserve University, 2004
BS, Johns Hopkins University, 2000
Expertise
Building patient-specific models of cardiac arrhythmia to make antiarrhythmic drug therapy safer and more effective
Focus
Cardiac Arrhythmia, Molecular Imaging, Engineered Cardiomyocytes, Computational Models, Extended Reality
Research
The Silva Lab studies how cardiac ion channels are altered by drugs and by physiological state, and how those changes give rise to arrhythmia. The work combines patch clamp recordings, fluorescent labels that report ion channel motion, human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes, native human ventricular myocytes, and computational models that link channel pharmacology to whole-heart electrocardiograms.
Current projects address why women face higher risk of drug-induced arrhythmia than men, how amiodarone (a commonly prescribed antiarrhythmic medication) produces its therapeutic effect, and how tyrosine kinase inhibitors used in cancer therapy disrupt cardiac electrophysiology.
Biography
Prof. Jonathan Silva joined the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis in July 2012, supported by a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface. His group develops machine learning models that predict patient response to class I antiarrhythmic drugs by integrating biophysical descriptions of drug-channel interactions with clinical data. The lab also developed holographic visualization software for catheter ablation procedures, and in clinical evaluation, the system was associated with improved physician spatial accuracy. The technology is now commercialized by SentiAR, Inc., where Prof. Silva serves as co-founder and Chief Technology Officer.
Centers & Affiliations
