Gabe Owens, MD, PhD
Dr. Owens has vast research experience in pre-clinical animal models of cardiovascular disease in addition to experience with developing new technology for cardiac therapy. His expertise will be utilized in experimental design, result interpretation, and clinical translation of the experiments proposed in this study. As a Pediatric Cardiologist and Cardiac Intensivist, Dr. Owens has observed and lived the realities of heart transplantation for children with congenital or acquired heart disease and has developed a passion to improve the paradigm. To increase the availability of this precious resource, Dr. Owens has been exploring ex vivo heart perfusion for the past 5 years and together with his scientific team has made tremendous advances. Recently, his team has perfused a large animal heart with normothermic perfusion for 72hrs and is poised to make further advances to bring prolonged normothermic cardiac perfusion to clinical fruition. In addition, he has vast experience in other translational science and animal models and has been studying therapeutic ultrasoundtechnologies to evaluate effectiveness and safety for the treatment of various cardiovascular diseases. He has begun a path through the FDA process to bring a device to clinical fruition for the treatment of Hypoplastic Left heart Syndrome in infants, has obtained a Humanitarian Device Exemption for this device, and is currently working on developing and initiating a clinical trial. With these experiences and clinical expertise, Dr. Owens is well poised as a clinician-scientist to lead the efforts for various projects and his expertise should help translate technologies to the clinical arena.