By this time tomorrow, your heart will have beaten 100,000 times. That’s 2.5 billion contractions In an average lifetime. The heart is the first organ that forms in the embryo, and when it stops beating, life ends.

It’s a natural, powerful electromechanical pump that can keep on going for 80 years, in some people, without ever needing a single repair. And yet, heart disease remains the number one killer, taking 610,000 lives a year.

Researchers from the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory are exploring the root causes of major heart disorders like atherosclerosis and valve impairment, while others are engineering methods to detect and fix the damage caused by heart disease.

Read the story and watch the video, available now in Georgia Tech’s Research Horizons.