2022 George E. Brown Memorial Lecturer - Sumanth D. Prabhu, MD, FAHA

Dr. Sumanth D. Prabhu is the Tobias and Hortense Lewin Distinguished Professor of Cardiovascular Diseases and the Chief of the Division of Cardiology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Dr. Prabhu is a heart failure cardiologist, physician-scientist, and mentor. His research, which has been funded by the NIH and the VA for more than 20 years, has focused on the role of inflammation and the immune system in heart failure. He has made several seminal contributions in this area. His laboratory defined a novel and previously unrecognized cardiosplenic axis in ischemic heart failure, with activated splenocytes homing to the heart to perpetuate tissue injury. His group delineated profound immune cell alterations, including expansion of innate (macrophages and dendritic cells) and adaptive (CD4+ T-cells, including memory T-cells) immune cells, both systemically and locally in the failing heart, and discovered that regulatory T-cells are characteristically dysfunctional and paradoxically pro-inflammatory (rather than immunomodulatory) in heart failure, thereby helping to drive chronic inflammation and adverse cardiac remodeling. He further established the importance of leukocyte inducible nitric oxide synthase in driving adverse remodeling, and linked monocyte-derived macrophage expansion with T-cell activation in the pressure-overloaded failing heart. His current work encompasses cell-autonomous mechanisms of inflammation in heart failure related to macrophage circadian clock dysfunction. Dr. Prabhu has won several awards, including designation as an Established Investigator of the American Heart Association, the Robert Berne Lecturer for the American Physiological Society, and membership in the American Society for Clinical Investigation.