Marat Fudim
Duke University, NC·Medicine & Clinical Research
Heart failure, a condition in which the heart cannot pump or fill well enough to meet the body's needs, affects more than 6 million adults in the U.S. Its hallmark is congestion: fluid builds up in the heart, lungs and veins, leaving people breathless and less able to move.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Physiology
- Topics
heart failure
HFpEF
HFrEF
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jan 2031
What they work on
- Test whether intravenous iron, compared with placebo, reduces death and hospitalization and improves quality of life in 300 older adults with HFpEF and iron deficiency, using a double-blind randomized trial run within routine care at four health systems.
- Measure whether IV iron improves physical function in HFpEF, using wearable-derived step count and gait speed checked against the 6-minute walk test and peak oxygen uptake (VO₂) from cardiopulmonary exercise testing.
- Determine the safety and effects of prolonged splanchnic nerve blockade, blocking nerves that control blood vessels around the gut, on blood flow, heart function and exercise performance in patients with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction.
- Visualize the splanchnic nerves with imaging tools placed inside blood vessels, and confirm that the nerve blockade has been carried out successfully.
- Define how splanchnic nerve blockade works and identify which types of congestion respond best, testing the idea that blood shifting out of the gut's vessels drives heart failure congestion.
More about the research
This research tests two new ways to help heart failure patients feel and function better. One clinical trial asks whether replacing missing iron helps older adults with a common, hard-to-treat form of the disease. A second project asks whether blocking certain abdominal nerves can relieve congestion.
Why it matters
Older adults with heart failure, especially those with HFpEF, often end up in the hospital and struggle with daily activity. Few treatments help them. The INFUSE-HFpEF trial could show whether IV iron, an existing therapy, improves quality of life, physical function and survival for iron-deficient HFpEF patients. The splanchnic nerve work could open a new, non-drug way to relieve congestion in heart failure.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Oguz Akbilgic
Wake Forest University, NC·Medicine & Clinical Research
Develop an AI model that predicts future heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) from ECG data, using carefully verified data from NIH-funded studies.
Thomas Vondriska
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Physiology
Map gene activity, chromatin accessibility and histone modifications in heart, kidney and liver of ZSF1 rats as HFpEF develops, building the first multi-organ epigenomic atlases of the disease.
Stefano Morotti
University of California-Davis, CA·Physiology
Identify key molecular and cellular changes in excitation-contraction coupling, the link between electrical signals and heartbeats, in a mouse model of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), using functional and transcriptomic data.
The school
Duke University: 61 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 417 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.