Issy Laher, BSc, MSc, PhD

Biography and/or Description of Research

Dr. Laher specializes in the pharmacology of autoregulation, autonomic pharmacology, vascular smooth muscle, and cerebrovascular pharmacology. His interests are in understanding the function of small blood vessels in health and disease. In particular, he studies arteries from the heart and brain.

Healthy blood vessels can regulate their diameter in an appropriate manner so that blood flow is kept near normal levels; this resting diameter is the balance of a number of constrictor (pressure, endothelin, etc.) and dilator (flow, nitric oxide, metabolites, etc.) influences. It is common for some or all such factors to be changed in diseases such as heart transplantation, infectious disease, stroke, etc. The level of resting blood vessel tone is intimately related to the availability of calcium and activation of enzymes that are sensitive to calcium within the cells. We monitor the diameter and calcium available to the cells of blood vessels and use agents to modify either the calcium that is available to the cell or the activities of enzymes that respond to calcium.

We also measure the electrical responses that govern vascular excitability and do this with simultaneous monitoring of artery diameter. Through these approaches we can better understand the mechanisms whereby blood vessel diameter is modified on both a short and long term basis. Our recent focus is in understanding the properties of small vessels in the heart and brain as they are altered by cigarette smoking with the goal of reversing or attenuation such changes.