Professor and cardiovascular and thoracic surgeon, Montreal General Hospital Research Institute
Dr. Ray Chiu was born in Tokyo. He received his MD from National Taiwan University, and his PhD from McGill in 1970, in Experimental Surgery. He pioneered a new type of experimental surgery that removes some of a heart patient's back muscle, attaches it to the ribs, and wraps it around the heart. A pacemaker contracts the back muscle in time with the heart's own contractions, thus helping a weak heart to function. The new surgery has advantages over the alternatives: heart transplants, while effective, are limited by the number of donors available and run the risk of transplant trauma, while electro-mechanical devices are subject to clotting, are often bulky or dependent on short-lived batteries. Chiu was the first to overcome the physiological obstacles to using other types of muscles to assist the heart's function. Heart muscle is the only kind that can contract regularly without tiring; other muscles require periods of rest. Thus the physiological and chemical factors of the back muscle have to be modified to become more like the heart. Collaborating with David Inuzzo, a biochemist of York University, Chiu subjected the latissimus dorsi muscle with four to six weeks of constant low frequency electrical stimulation, after which it came to resemble the heart muscle. The stimulation alters the expression of certain genes in the muscle cells. The process was actually discovered by biochemists in the late 60s, but was not applied to heart surgery until the research came to the attention of cardiac surgeons in the last decade. A major contribution of Chiu's group was the development of the special pacemaker required, which uses "pulse-train stimulation", since skeletal and heart muscles contract in different ways. Chiu has two children and is married to Jane Chiu, MD and Assistant Professor, Pediatrics, McGill U.
Sources: McGill News, Fall, 1990
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