Dr. Olga Rafikova

Dr. Rafikova has worked in the area of cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases for over 20 years. Since 2015, Dr. Rafikova has been an Assistant Professor at the Department of Medicine, the University of Arizona, leading a multidisciplinary research group. She is an inventor, translational researcher, precision medicine, and sex-oriented innovator. Dr. Rafikova has research interests in sex-specific therapeutic approaches in pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), a deadly disease with no effective therapy.

Dr. Rafikova dedicates a lot of her effort to design and test the unique peptide-based therapeutics that, in contrast to the classical “small molecule” inhibitors, specifically attenuate the pathological, disease-driven signaling without affecting the normal physiological function of the protein. She has five active patent applications aimed to treat different cardiovascular disease.