Matthew Caporizzo, Ph.D., assistant professor of molecular physiology and biophysics at the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine

(AUGUST 12, 2024) Researchers including Matthew Caporizzo, Ph.D., assistant professor of molecular physiology and biophysics at the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine, and colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine have discovered a promising new treatment for heart disease, WVNY-TV reports.

Caporizzo says nearly 50 percent of those diagnosed with heart disease suffer from a condition that causes heart muscles to become plugged up. The new treatment is a vasohibin inhibitor, or VASHi, that allows those muscles to relax and get the heart to pump blood properly again.

“The primary symptom of this disease is exercise intolerance … This drug makes it so that relaxation helps the heart relax faster,” Caporizzo said. “Everything right now looks very promising … This is a really exciting thing because it does appear to work and it doesn’t appear to have a lot of harmful effects so far.”

The research, “Vasohibin inhibition improves myocardial relaxation in a rat model of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction,” was published in a recent issue of Science Translational Medicine.