Education & Training:
Utrecht University, Netherlands, 1994 B.S.& M.S. in Medical Biology
Utrecht University, Netherlands, 1997 Ph.D. in Cardiac Physiology
Universities of Freiburg and Göttingen, Germany, 2000 Postdoctoral Fellow
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 2002 Research Associate

Research Interest:
My independent research program is directed towards unraveling the mechanisms and modulators of cardiac and skeletal muscle relaxation in health and disease, and I have led and participated in numerous studies in which contractile properties, and malfunction of these properties, were central to the investigation. In addition, I have led as well as participated as a collaborator in many short-term and long-term effects of treatments where my lab’s assessments such as muscle contractile force in skeletal and cardiac muscle were primary end-points. We have pioneered several novel assessment techniques, including the assessment of myofilament calcium sensitivity in intact muscle under physiological conditions, the multi-day culture of multicellular (human and rabbit) muscle preparations including gene transfer to these cultured muscles, protocols to measure cross-bridge kinetics in intact myocardium, and assessment of calcium transients in multicellular preparations with cell-to-cell resolution. For most of these studies we use mice and rabbits and have successfully used rats, human, dogs, macaque, and zebrafish muscle preparations. For the translational aspects of my work I was awarded the prestigious 2010 American Physiological Society Bowditch Award.

Selected Publications:

• Milani-Nejad N, Chung JH, Canan BD, Fedorov VV, Whitson BA, Kilic A, Mohler PJ, Janssen PML. Increased cross-bridge recruitment contributes to transient increase in force generation beyond maximal capacity in human myocardium. J Mol Cell Cardiol. 2017:114;116-123. PMID: 29141185

• Elnakish MT, Canan BD, Kilic A, Mohler PJ, Janssen PML. Effects of Zacopride, a Moderate IK1 channel agonist, on Triggered Arrhythmia and Contractility in Human Ventricular Myocardium. Pharmacological Research, 2017;115:309-318. PMID 27914945

• Lowe J, Floyd KT, Rastogi N, Schultz EJ, Chadwick JA, Swager SA, Zins JG, Kadakia FK, Smart S, Gomez-Sanchez EP, Gomez-Sanchez CE, Raman SV, Janssen PML*, Rafael-Fortney JA*. Similar efficacy from specific and non-specific mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist treatment of muscular dystrophy mice. J. Neuromusc. Diseases, 2016;3:395-404, *contributed equally. PMID 27822449

• Janssen PML, Biesiadecki BJ, Ziolo MT, Davis JP. The Need for Speed: Mice, Men, and Myocardial Kinetic Reserve. Circ. Res. 2016;119:418-422. PMID 27458197

• Milani-Nejad N, Chung JH, Canan BD, Davis JP, Fedorov VV, Higgins SD, Kilic A, Mohler PJ, Janssen PML. Insights into Length-Dependent Regulation of Cardiac Cross-Bridge Cycling kinetics in Human Myocardium. Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics, 2016;601:48-55. PMID 26854725

NCBI link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/browse/collection/41146939/?sort=date&direction=descending