2011 research spending
Every
piece of research we support aims to fight heart
disease by paving the way for new treatments to tackle the
UK’s biggest killer.
Many projects aim to solve specific scientific questions,
leading us step by step towards new treatments. Some grants help to
build whole new research centres for studying heart disease.
So far this year, we’ve:
- given more than £35 million to fund life-saving research
- awarded around 100 different grants to scientists working
in all areas of heart research
What we've funded
We gave more than £1.3m to the
new BHF Centre for Cardiovascular
Target Discovery at the University
of Oxford. This will allow teams of researchers to screen
thousands of chemicals to look for potential new drug
treatments for heart patients, using complex screening
systems.
We’ve also awarded £6m to Imperial College
London and £3m to the University of Leicester to help pay
for new laboratories.
Other grants of more than £1m so far this year
include supporting a programme at the University of Edinburgh,
exploring the relationship between hormones and
important risk
factors in the development of heart disease.
We also gave more than £1.8m to support a
programme at the University of Southampton which will test
new technology, aiming to help people with
heart failure.
Hope for the future
We fund more than half of all research
into cardiovascular disease in the UK. Through 50 years of research progress we’ve made many
breakthroughs in the fight against heart disease. The research we
fund today brings more hope for the future.
The most high-profile research breakthroughs
we’ve funded this year include Professor
Paul Riley’s discovery that cells from the outer layer
of the heart can become beating heart cells. The discovery
gives hope that in the future, we might be able to regrow heart
muscle damaged after a heart attack – the aim of our Mending Broken Hearts Appeal.
