Cardiac arrhythmias kill approximately 420,000 Americans each year, and a much greater number suffer disability ranging from minor symptoms to stroke. Implanted defibrillators and ablative techniques have provided benefit in some patients, but available antiarrhythmic drugs are incompletely effective and impose serious toxicity. Advances in clinical medicine and animal models that define specific arrhythmia syndromes and an increasingly sophisticated view of the molecular and genetic mechanisms that underlie them generate a realistic expectation of developing new drug strategies to impact this problem. Current drugs impair normal ion channel function, new advances identify new targets, such as channels activated in disease or signaling pathways whose activation is arrhythmogenic. The goal of this meeting will be to bring together scientists with diverse expertise in the perturbed biology that underlies arrhythmias, to develop new interdisciplinary dialogue and collaborations that will be necessary to exploit the opportunities offered by new information on arrhythmia mechanisms.
