Dr. Luigi Adamo joined the Department of Medicine in the Division of Cardiology as an Instructor in July, 2019.
Dr. Adamo is a heart failure specialist and a basic scientist committed to excellence and innovation.
After graduating from University of Palermo School of Medicine in Italy, he moved to Boston where he obtained a PhD in Biology and Biomedical Sciences at Harvard University. After a brief parenthesis in a start-up, he joined the Physician Scientists Training Program at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University in St Louis. Here, he completed training in Internal Medicine, Cardiology and Advanced Heart Failure before doing Post-Doctoral Research in the laboratory of Dr. Doug Mann.
Dr. Adamo is interested in both clinical and basic biomedical research. His clinical research focuses on the study of heart failure with recovered ejection fraction and on patient selection for durable Mechanical Circulatory Support. He has shown that in patients with normalized ejection fraction (EF), Global Longitudinal Strain correlates with the likelihood of redeveloping a reduced EF during follow up. He has established international collaborations to expand on these findings and is actively involved in several projects aimed at improving the ability to differentiate true myocardial recovery from transient myocardial remission in patients with normalized EF. In the context of durable mechanical circulatory support, he has been interested in developing quantitative tools to identify the patients that are most likely to benefit from LVAD implant, looking at both objective and patient reported outcomes.
Dr. Adamo’s basic science research focuses on the study of B lymphocytes’ effects on the heart in health and disease. The murine naïve heart hosts a large pool of B lymphocytes but very little is known about their function. He found that small molecule mediated modulation of myocardial B cell activation has marked cardioprotective effects in humans. He is now interested in understanding the biology of myocardial B cells in health and disease, with the goal of developing novel B cell targeting therapeutic tools for the treatment of heart failure and cardiovascular disease.