Large-scale study to aid prediction and prevention of coronary heart disease

Large-scale integrative studies of risk factors in coronary heart disease: from discovery to application. (renewal: years 11-15) (Joint funding with MRC)

The British Heart Foundation is funding BHF Professor John Danesh, at the University of Cambridge, nearly £2 million over five years to create an international group of heart experts. This group will bring together data from around the world which will inform the development of new heart medicines. Data from more than 50,000 heart patients and 50,000 healthy individuals will become available for research. This will include details on their physical characteristics, genetic profile, lifestyle and risk factors for disease. Uniquely, this information is available at the level of individual patients. This will be a very powerful tool in trying to understand the fundamental causes of heart disease to enable the development of new medicines. Professor Danesh is a pioneering leader in the field of public health, with a special focus on cardiovascular disease. The collaborative group hope to better identify the pathways that go wrong in heart disease to identify potential new medicines to target these. They want to confirm just how effective and specific a new medicine might be at correcting the pathway before costly clinical trials begin. Based on this knowledge, they will screen and select particular patients whose type of heart disease means that they may benefit most from this targeted treatment. The group will also look at improving some of the research methods that are used in trials of CHD patients to improve the accuracy of results. In particular, they plan to investigate better ways to catalogue the nutritional information in peoples’ diets, which may be inaccurately described and may bias studies. This project should identify new causes of CHD worldwide as well as define the importance of suspected risk factors to help guide the research community’s focus in the coming years. The information may help generate a risk score for CHD based on measurements of blood biochemistry and genetic factors. This could be particularly important for younger people who may be able to modify their lifestyle behaviour to lower their risk of developing CHD in the future.