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The Big Beat Challenge: £30 million to start a revolution
OK, so picture this. You entered a competition and you won £30 million. £30,000,000 – that’s a lot of zeros! What do you do with all that money? How do you spend it? Do you go on a lot of luxury holidays or do you use it to change lives across the globe?
For many scientists, the answer to that question is a no-brainer: use it to transform lives across the world. Thanks to the British Heart Foundation, four teams of researchers are now very close to making that possibility a reality.
Presenting the Big Beat Challenge: a single research award of up to £30 million for the world’s greatest minds to tackle the world’s biggest killers. Out of the 75 proposals received, 4 have been shortlisted…
But which research team will come out on top and win the entire competition?
A cure for heart failure
Will it be Professor Jolanda Kluin leading a team from the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands) whose plan is to create a cure for heart failure?
Heart failure means that your heart is not pumping blood around your body as effectively as it should. If you have severe heart failure, a heart transplant may be considered. In the UK, the average wait for an adult who needs a heart transplant is nearly three years, that is an average of 1,085 days, for patients who have never been on the urgent waiting list.
It’s hard to imagine, but three years is a long time to live with a failing heart. If only there was a radical solution to this permanent shortage of donor hearts. If only we could replace the need for human heart transplantation and give hope to those around the world who are desperately waiting for a donated organ.
With Professor Kluin’s vision of a soft robotic heart, “if only” might one day become a clinical reality. In this project, the plan is to design, build and test a hybrid heart that consists of a soft robotic shell, artificial muscles and sensors to enable natural motion, and a tissue-engineered lining to make sure all the surfaces in contact with blood are safe. The energy transfer will be wireless.
Yes, it’s the stuff science fiction is made of – having a failing heart replaced by a soft robotic heart - but it’s these kinds of breakthroughs that will set the tone for a better future.
Mapping atherosclerosis
Atherosclerosis is the build-up of fatty material inside your arteries. It’s the condition that causes most heart attacks and strokes. In the UK, 180 people die from heart attacks each day, while strokes cause around 36,000 deaths a year.
A team led by BHF Professor Ziad Mallat at the University of Cambridge (UK) want to improve these devastating statistics. If they win the £30 million award, they plan to use cutting-edge technologies and human data to build a detailed map and understanding of atherosclerotic plaques. You can think of it as the Google Map of your arteries. If your arteries are the roads, the fatty deposits are the roadworks blocking the flow of blood.
In the future, this advanced understanding could reveal new targets for immunotherapy treatments to combat atherosclerosis and may lead to a new wave of medicines and vaccines that can prevent heart attacks and strokes. Can you imagine being able to get a vaccine against a heart attack?
Treating cardiomyopathies
Cardiomyopathies are diseases of the heart muscle which can affect its shape, size and structure. Often, cardiomyopathies have a genetic basis and so if you have a type of cardiomyopathy, there is a 50 per cent chance that your child will inherit the condition.
Dilated (DCM) and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) are the two most common cardiomyopathies. In DCM, the heart muscle becomes stretched and thin whereas in HCM it becomes thickened. As a result, the heart muscle becomes unable to pump blood around the body efficiently. In the UK, DCM and HCM are estimated to affect up to 260,000 and 120,000 people respectively, with DCM being the leading cause of heart transplantation.
In this project, led by BHF Professor Hugh Watkins at the University of Oxford (UK), the researchers hope to develop a treatment that targets the faulty genes responsible for cardiomyopathies. By combining a deep understanding of the genetics with new technologies, the team aims to stop the progression of the damage caused by genetic heart muscle diseases, or even cure it, all together.
Next generation cardiovascular health tech
Nowadays, a lot of people have fitness trackers to measure their activities. “How many steps did I do today? How many miles did I run? How many calories did I burn?”
In this project, led by Professor Frank Rademakers at KU Leuven (Belgium), the plan is to develop wearable technology (similar to fitness trackers) that captures more data than ever before.
For example, let’s say you’re at a street food market on Saturday afternoon and you experience a momentary mild discomfort in your chest. It doesn’t feel urgent, so you don’t go see the doctor until Monday. In the clinic, your doctor asks you to recall your symptoms and also measures your heart function. Unfortunately, this tells them little about what happened to you and your heart on Saturday afternoon at the market.
However, if you were wearing this proposed technology at the moment of discomfort, it would have logged data such as your heart function, physical activity and symptoms. It would have even recorded the air quality at the market, which can affect the heart and circulation. In addition to your genetic and healthcare data, this could help provide a better diagnosis. In fact, this new technology has the potential to transform the way doctors diagnose, monitor and treat heart and circulatory diseases.
So, from 75 proposals from 21 countries across the globe, we’ve narrowed it down to these 4, all of which have the potential to change the world as we know it. But now we need to choose the winner of our £30 million award. If you were a judge on our panel, which team would you pick to win the Big Beat Challenge?