This is the title of a recent editorial in one of the world’s leading cardiology journals, European Heart Journal, which describes the work of Ming Lei, Derek Terrar and their colleagues. The editorial refers to their article published in 2018 in Circulation that was the subject of an item in our Recent Discoveries section (https://pharm.ox.ac.uk/discoveries). The editorial points out that almost 4 million people in the world die each year from cardiac arrhythmias and that there is currently a mismatch between basic research studies and translation into drugs used in clinical practice. As Lei says ‘this has led to a loss of confidence in both existing
and potential future antiarrhythmic drugs by both clinicians and pharmaceutical companies’. Lei’s article set out to correct this mismatch and to update the famous classification of anti-arrhythmic drugs introduced 50 y ago by two former members of the Department, Vaughan-Williams and Singh. The review in Circulation was an instant ‘hit’ being in the top 5% of research outputs scored by Altimetric and has been downloaded from the journal web site nearly 15,000 times. The authors hope that the review will encourage rational clinical use of existing available anti-arrhythmic drugs in relationship to their particular mechanisms of action, thus optimizing treatment decisions, and prompting new strategies in current clinical practice. They also hope it will promote the discovery of future drugs and therapies for managing cardiac arrhythmias, so improving clinical practice. The editorial can be found at https://doi.org/10.1093/eurheartj/ehz063