David Kass, MD

David A. Kass, M.D. is the Abraham and Virginia Weiss Professor of Cardiology, and Professor in the Departments of Medicine, Biomedical Engineering, Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences, and in the graduate programs of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Pathobiology.  He received his B.A. in Applied Physics & Engineering from Harvard University in 1975 and M.D. from Yale University School of Medicine in 1980. He completed residency in Internal Medicine at George Washington University in 1983, and Cardiovascular Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in 1986. Among his many honors are the 2020 Louis and Artur Lucien Prize in Cardiovascular Disease, the Peter Harris Distinguished Scientist Award and Innovator Award from ISHR in 2018 and 2020, Two sequential Outstanding Investigator Awards from the National Institutes of Health, 2008 Basic Science Achievement Award and 2022 Distinguished Scientist Award from the American Heart Association, Distinction in Teaching and Mentorship, and Clinical Innovator and Mentor Award, and 2026 School of Medicine Dean's Distinguished Mentorship Award, from Johns Hopkins University. He has trained over 110 postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, most moving onto academic research and leadership positions at institutions throughout the world.  Dr. Kass directs the Johns Hopkins Institute of CardioScience (ICS), and was director and later co-director of an NIH T32 post-doctoral fellowship program in cardiovascular research that was recently renewed for what will now extend to over half a century of continuous funding support. 

Dr. Kass' research aims to expand our understanding of cardiac disease in its many manifestations, to identify novel mechanisms and avenues for treatment, and ultimately translate them to therapies in the clinic. Under his Directorship, the ICS broadly works to understand causes of cardiovascular disease using molecular and cellular biology, organ and whole animal models, regenerative medicine approaches, and bio-engineering to develop new methods for diagnosis and treatment.  In his lab, Dr. Kass and colleagues have discovered a number of new methods to treat heart failure with depressed heart function, including a form of nitric oxide called nitroxyl, an inhibitor of phosphodiesterase type 1 and type 9, a mutant form of a protein involved with protein quality control called Chip, and using a novel pacemaker strategy termed PITA. He pioneered research into how a major enzyme known as Protein Kinase G functions in the heart muscle, and how its activation can benefit heart disease. This has resulted in new discoveries with applications to heart failure, obesity, muscular dystrophy, cardiac hypertrophy and fibrosis, and even immune-cancer therapy. In addition, his laboratory is dissecting the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying right heart disease associated with heart failure with pulmonary hypertension from systemic sclerosis, and cardiometabolic disease. His lab is funded by the National Institutes of Health, American Heart Association, and industry pursuing early-stage research therapy development.

Currently, his lab focuses on investigating underlying mechanisms and developing new therapies for the over half of all heart failure known as heart failure with preserved ejection fraction - or HFpEF.  This syndrome still has few effective treatments, and intriguingly those that have been most impactful influence metabolic aspects.  Traditional drugs used for the other main form of heart failure with reduced ejection fraction - or dilated cardiomyopathy - that can lead to need for heart transplantation - have not worked in HFpEF.  The lab makes use of unique access to human myocardial samples to determine molecular and cellular abnormalities, and then test their function impact in the cells from the tissue samples themselves, or using various basic cellular and animal models.