The overall theme of research in the Roden laboratory is mechanisms underlying variability in response to drug therapy, with a particular focus on therapies used to treat cardiac arrhythmias. The individual projects focus on emerging models in molecular medicine and genetics, and incorporate the expertise of the laboratory in electrophysiologic methods.

The lab has a strong tradition in translating discovery from the bedside to the bench and back. Thus, another focus of current work is studies of arrhythmia genomics and pharmacogenomics. Dr. Roden directs the Pharmacogenomics of Arrhythmia Therapy (PAT) program, the Vanderbilt site part of the NIH Pharmacogenetics Research Network.

The site's efforts are directed at studies of drugs used to treat cardiac arrhythmias as well as on testing the hypothesis that the increasingly well-recognized effect of certain drugs to unexpectedly provoke potentially fatal arrhythmias includes a genetic component. Work in PAT identifies common polymorphisms and genomic structures in arrhythmia candidate genes (ion channel and other), establishes function of these variants, and studies association between DNA variants and large databases of patients with defined arrhythmia and drug response phenotypes.

Dr. Roden also serves as the US coordinator for the Trans-Atlantic Network, funded by the Leducq Foundation, studying the genomics of sudden cardiac death.