Michel Haïssaguerre

In 2011, he founded LIRYC, a research Institute focusing on Cardiac Electrophysiology and Modeling, which brings together 150 members from multiple disciplines. Its goal is to improve understanding of the electrical activity of the heart, to reduce suffering and mortality due to heart rhythm disorders.

Ventricular fibrillation is a major cause of cardiac arrest, or sudden cardiac death, which accounts for about 10% of mortality in adults, causing 350 000 deaths in the US each year. Michel Haïssaguerre‘s team showed that patients with sudden cardiac death and structurally normal hearts frequently had triggers originating from Purkinje fibers, a physiological tissue representing 2% of myocardial mass. The same tissue was confirmed to also play a pathogenic role in ventricular fibrillation associated with myocardial infarction, cardiomyopathies and other conditions. The team pioneered the use of catheter ablation to treat ventricular fibrillation in 2002.

Haïssaguerre was born in Bayonne, France. He became a Professor of Cardiology in 1994. His present position is Chief of the Cardiac Pacing and Electrophysiology department at the Haut–Lévèque Cardiology Hospital, part of the Bordeaux University Hospital Community. He was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 2010.

Michel Haïssaguerre (October 1955) is a French cardiologist and electrophysiologist. His investigations have been the basis for development of new markers and therapies for atrial and ventricular fibrillation.

Later, Michel Haïssaguerre’s team investigated cardiac fibrillation, the most complex and severe type of arrhythmias, defined as "turbulent, disorganized electrical activity’’. Cardiac fibrillation involves different mechanisms acting separately or together, the main phenomenon being circus movement, or reentry (Georges Ralph Mines, 1913). A combination of spatiotemporal factors is required to establish reentry, a process occurring at a macroscopic scale rather than at the cellular level, with antiarrhythmic drugs (ion channel blockers) having limited efficacy or even proarrythmic effects in clinic (CAST trial). Apart from antiarrhythmic drugs, a surgical approach to block electrical reentries had been proposed, by James Cox et al (1987) to treat atrial fibrillation, using a series of full-thickness incisions (Cox maze procedure).