Miami, FL - Dr Vivek Y Reddy (Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston) and Dr Gervasio A Lamas (Mount Sinai Medical Center, Miami, FL) have added their names to the list of cardiology talent moving to the University of Miami (UM) Miller School of Medicine in recent years, the center recently announced.

Dr Gervasio A Lamas

Lamas, a clinician and clinical-trial investigator with broad interests, is making his in-town move to direct the coronary care unit and the fellowship training program at the University of Miami Hospital and the fellowship training program at another affiliated center, Jackson Memorial Hospital, according to a UM press release. He has been at Mount Sinai for the past 15 years, most recently as its director of cardiovascular research and academic affairs.

Dr Joshua Hare, who heads the school's cardiovascular division, describes Lamas in the release as "an internationally recognized leader in the management of patients surviving heart attacks" and "a world leader in the understanding of how to best use pacemakers." The release also notes that Lamas currently chairs the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT) and cochairs the Occluded Artery Trial (OAT) long-term follow-up, both National Institute of Health-sponsored studies.

Dr Vivek Y Reddy

Reddy, who has been heading the experimental electrophysiology program at Mass General, will direct an expanded EP program at UM that will include at least three other new team members.

One pet interest he will be pursuing at UM, Reddy told heartwire, is the integration of cardiac imaging and catheter ablation techniques. "Over the past four or five years in electrophysiology, there's been a revolution in terms of how we image the tissue," he said. "Many of the ablation procedures, particularly for atrial fibrillation, have become quite complex, and we've realized when using either CT imaging or MRI that we can get beautiful three-dimensional images of the chambers. So my research has involved how to integrate those images into our mapping systems to do the ablations."

Pressed by heartwire, Reddy insisted that getting away from the legendary New England winters had nothing to do with his decision to move to Florida. "I'm not complaining about it, but that wasn't the reason," he laughed. "I'm going from a great job to a great job, that's what it comes down to."

Dr Andre d'Avila is accompanying Reddy from Mass General to become associate director of UM's EP section. Reddy notes that it was d'Avila's group in São Paulo, Brazil that pioneered the technique of epicardial mapping to guide ablations, a percutaneous procedure in which the mapping catheter accesses the heart across the pericardial space, in much the same way a pericardiocentesis is conducted.

Dr Srinivas Dukkipati, whom Reddy said did his EP training at Mass General before heading to the William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, MI, where he has been director of basic electrophysiology research, is also joining the team. The UM release says that Dukkipati "has been involved in the use of advanced balloon catheter technologies for the treatment of atrial fibrillation and has worked with Dr Reddy on the application of real-time MRI in electrophysiology procedures."

The fourth new EP specialist will be Dr Kyoko Soejima, with whom Reddy crossed paths when she trained at Brigham and Women's Hospital, in Boston, and who "has been on the cutting edge of ablation for ventricular tachycardia," he said. Soejima is coming to UM from her current post at the Institute of Advanced Cardiac Therapy in Tokyo, according to the press release.

UM's Miller School of Medicine, as chronicled by heartwire, has managed to lure a small army of cardiovascular specialists away from some prominent centers in recent years. They included Hare, who came from Johns Hopkins University in 2006. Also that year, Dr William O'Neill left the Beaumont to join the UM cardiology section as well as become the school's executive dean of clinical affairs, and Dr Pascal J Goldschmidt left Duke University to be the school's senior vice president for medical affairs and UM's dean. Also, Dr David Seo left Duke earlier this year to become director of UM's genomic medicine and biorepository program.