Christopher Newton-Cheh, MD, MPH

Dr. Newton-Cheh is a complex trait geneticist and cardiovascular epidemiologist, and holds positions as assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is on the faculty of the MGH Center for Human Genetic Research and the Cardiovascular Research Center, where he co-directs the Human Cardiovascular Genetics Program. After medical school at Columbia, he trained in internal medicine and cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he also served as medicine chief resident.  He completed post-doctoral fellowships at the Broad Institute and the Framingham Heart Study.

 The Newton-Cheh laboratory investigates hypertension, sudden cardiac death and cardiotoxic drug response. Dr. Newton-Cheh is leveraging the rapid growth of human genetics to identify genetic variants that underlie these diseases, translate genetic discoveries into an improved understanding of human (patho-)physiology through patient-oriented research, and define the role of genetics and other factors in predicting patients’ risk of disease.

 Dr. Newton-Cheh has led multi-national consortia that have used genome-wide association studies to identify many common genetic variants that influence QT interval and drug-induced arrhythmia.  He is actively pursuing research to determine the role of pre-prescription genotyping to identify individuals at increased or reduced risk of drug-induced arrhythmias.