Forging New Futures in a New Field.

• Position: CARDIO-ONCOLOGY

Within the past decade, cardiologists and other clinicians began to notice a puzzling trend: a small percentage of their patients who previously had been treated for cancers were developing heart conditions. More questions than answers were available, so researchers around the globe began exploring a new field called cardio-oncology, with a goal of understanding the connections between cancer treatments and the heart.

For some researchers, like Sakima Smith, the work is personal. Smith, a heart-failure transplant cardiologist and cardio-oncology researcher at Ohio State University Medical Center, witnessed this tragedy early on in his medical career. During his first year as an attending physician, Smith met a 28-year-old man suffering from cardiac shock. He was on a ventilator, his heart essentially not functioning anymore. Puzzled, Smith and others conducted a barrage of tests to determine what led to this young man's heart failure. Looking into his medical history, they found he suffered from lymphoma when he was three years old.

Chemotherapy had helped the boy enter remission, but years later, as an...