For nearly two decades, Rohan Dharmakumar, PhD, of Krannert Cardiovascular Research Center at the Indiana University School of Medicine has been on a mission to understand the cause of chronic heart failure in heart attack patients treated with percutaneous coronary intervention, a minimally invasive surgical procedure to re-establish blood flow following a sudden obstruction of the coronary artery - the vessel supplying blood to the heart muscle - that causes heart attacks. While restorative treatments have saved millions of patients from immediate death after a heart attack, about half of patients develop chronic heart failure within five years. Dharmakumar and his team seek to understand the underlying mechanisms that lead to heart muscle damage and use that knowledge to develop appropriate therapeutics.