  We review a new approach to open heavy flavor production in heavy ion
collisions based on Soft Collinear Effective Theory (SCET). We include both
finite heavy quark masses in the SCET Lagrangian and Glauber gluons that
describe the interaction of collinear partons with the hot and dense QCD
medium. From the new effective field theory, we derive massive in-medium
splitting kernels and propose a new framework for including in-medium
interactions consistent with next-to-leading order calculations in QCD. We
present numerical results for the suppression of $D$- and $B$-mesons and
compare to results obtained within the traditional approach to parton energy
loss. We find good agreement when comparing to existing data from the LHC at
$\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=5.02$ TeV and 2.76 TeV.
