Kumaraswamy Nanthakumar, MD, FRCPC

Dr. Nanthakumar has been a Cardiologist and Cardiac Electrophysiologist at Toronto General Hospital for 20 years, where he has served as Director of Heart Rhythm Disorders for a decade. He became a full Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto (U of T) in 2014 and is also a Senior Scientist at Toronto General Hospital Research Institute. He is a dedicated teacher, passionate in training and mentoring future electrophysiologists in complex electrophysiological interventions both locally and internationally. He holds global acclaim in intracardiac mapping with DeEP, Omnipolar, and Repolarisation mapping among his fields of expertise. He has a prolific publication record of over 200 original peer-reviewed journal articles and has been cited over 5,900 times with an h-index over 40. He is also an inventor/innovator at Techna. He has been granted multiple intellectual property (IP) rights in North America and Europe and is involved in the commercialization of his IP.

The majority of Dr. Nanthakumar's medical education and training took place at U of T, starting in 1991. He completed medical school at U of T in 1995, followed by postgraduate training in Internal Medicine and Cardiology also at U of T. He subsequently completed an additional 3-year subspecialization in cardiac electrophysiology at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, USA, where he studied the mechanisms of cardiac arrhythmias and built expertise in cardiac mapping. His clinical expertise is focused on devices for heart failure and performing catheter ablation of ventricular tachycardia and supra ventricular tachycardias.

 

The most common causes of sudden cardiac death are ventricular fibrillation (VF) and ventricular tachycardia (VT). The objective of Dr Nanthakumar’s research program for the past two decades was to understand the mechanisms of human VF and the factors that modulate them. Having studied mechanisms of VF for 20 years, his research has shifted towards ventricular arrhythmogenesis in onco-cardiology. Specifically, the focus of Dr Nanthakumar’s current research is on  cardiac arrhythmia and dysfunction due to cardiotoxicity of chemotherapy medications such as anthracyclines and Bruton's tyrosine kinase inhibitors, and devising new therapies for these emerging issues. He is also focused on mapping and ablation strategies for VT in heart failure.

Dr Nanthakumar's laboratory is also focused on commercialization and work is underway to commercialize intellectual properties on RyR2 modulation and novel cardiac mapping technologies. Other commercialization efforts include the co-development of mapping methodology with Biosense Webster of DeEP VT mapping technology. His latest focus on mapping research relates to repolarization mapping and electrotomographic mapping for clinical applications. His laboratory was crucially involved in co-developing Omnipolar mapping with Abbott Laboratories.

 

For a list of Dr. Nanthakumar's publications, please visit PubMed or Scopus.


Active Staff, Toronto General Hospital and Mount Sinai Hospital
Graduate Appointment, Institute of Medical Science