Prof. Dr. David Langleben is a Professor of Medicine at McGill University. He is the Director of the Cardiology Division of the Jewish General Hospital and founded and directs the Centre for Pulmonary Vascular Disease, an internationally recognized resource for patient care, teaching, and research. He is a Project Director at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research. His research focuses on the vascular biology of pulmonary hypertension. He has studied endothelial dysfunction in the disorder, at the cellular, organ, and whole-body level. He and his colleagues were the first to identify endothelin-1 as a mediator in pulmonary hypertension. Over the following 20 years, this discovery led to the development of several approved therapies that have benefitted thousands of patients. His group has gone on to study the clearance of endothelin-1 in pulmonary hypertension and to examine mechanisms that control its synthesis. Recent work has focused on the effects of bone morphogenic proteins and other members of the transforming growth factor-β family of molecules on the control of endothelin-1 production. Another major focus has been to measure the degree of loss of lung microvessels in pulmonary hypertension and to assess its impact on prognosis, response to therapy, and exercise capacity.
