The BHF-Turing Cardiovascular Data Science Awards (First Call): Looking for cardiovascular risk factors in blood smear images (joint funding with The Alan Turing Institute)
Atherosclerosis is the disease process in which plaques containing fat and white blood cells build up in the walls of arteries. These can rupture, activating tiny blood cells called platelets to clump together and form a clot. Heart attacks and strokes can occur when these blood clots block an artery that feeds the heart or brain. Studying white blood cells and platelets helps us to better understand these heart and circulatory conditions. Dr William Astle and his team aim to identify the properties of blood cells that may increase our risk of heart attack or stroke. They will make use a bank of blood samples from 30,000 healthy people, which have already been collected as part of another research study. Blood cells from these samples have been photographed at very high resolution. The Cambridge team will develop computer algorithms to analyse these images and measure properties of platelets and white blood cells in these samples. They will then search for genes that are known to affect these properties and see if they correspond with locations in the human genome known to influence a person’s risk of having a heart attack or stroke. This work will improve our understanding of blood related risk factors for heart and circulatory disease, and could help the future development of medicines for prevention or treatment of heart attack and stroke.
Project details
| Grant amount | £47,362 |
|---|---|
| Grant type | Chairs & Programme Grants |
| Application type | Special Project |
| Start Date | 01 February 2019 |
| Duration | 1 year, 6 months |
| Reference | SP/18/7/33806 |
| Status | In Progress |
