Stellar blood vessels takes crown in national science image competition

Today we have announced the winner of our annual Reflections of Research science image competition. Blending the wonders of science and art, the competition challenges BHF-funded scientists to showcase their awe-inspiring research into cardiovascular health and disease through stunning imagery. 

Judges’ Winner and Supporter’s Favourite: A flare of stellar vessels by Dr Régis Joulia, Imperial College London

This year, ‘A flare of stellar vessels’ took the double win as it single-handedly stole the hearts of the judges and BHF supporters, crowning it the Judges’ Winner and Supporter’s Favourite.

Although we may think this is an image of a distant constellation or a tropical flower, it shows a small region of a human lung and its rich supply of blood vessels in red. The tiny green dots reveal immune cells called mast cells in the lungs and the blue dots are pericytes which are crucial cells for blood vessels to maintain their structure.

The body can be in a state of long-term inflammation in people with asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and a condition called pulmonary hypertension, where there’s high blood pressure in the lungs. This chronic inflammation can have detrimental effects on the amount of oxygen in the blood.

The winning researcher, Dr Régis Joulia, is a BHF Research Fellow at the BHF Centre of Research Excellence, Imperial College London. His research aims to look at how the activation of immune cells disrupts the structure of lung blood vessels in these chronic inflammatory conditions. 

Judges’ trio of runner-ups

‘Regenerating heart’ by Pragati Pandey, Imperial College London

The judges’ scores led to a three-way tie for runner-up. The entry may look like an alien life form, but in green is a cross section of a rat’s heart with a patch of living heart cells shown in purple. This patch made from stem cells acts as a sticking plaster to repair damage to the heart muscle after a heart attack. 

‘Regenerating heart’ from Pragati Pandey, a PhD student at Imperial College London, showcases his work that aims to use this repairable patch to replace and repair the cells lost after a heart attack and to prevent heart failure from developing.

‘Blood vessel volcano’ by Dr Rhéure Alves-Lopes, University of Glasgow 

The next runner-up, ‘Blood vessel volcano’ came from Dr Rhéure Alves-Lopes, a Post-Doctoral researcher at the University of Glasgow. What looks like a bird’s-eye view of an active volcano ready to erupt, is in fact a human blood vessel in green with blood flowing through its centre in red.

Arteries and veins are the highways of the body, responsible for transporting blood, oxygen and nutrients. Dr Alves-Lopes captured this image to look at the vessel architecture of people with and without high blood pressure. He hopes to identify a new protein involved in high blood pressure to ultimately find a new drug target to treat this silent killer.

‘Heart within a heart’ by Christina Gkantsinikoudi and Dr Neil Dufton, Queen Mary University of London

The final image to make the Judges’ runner-up joint trio, ‘Heart within a heart’, was captured by Christina Gkantsinikoudi and Dr Neil Dufton at Queen Mary University of London. While it might look like coral found deep underwater, it shows damage to the heart in blue after a heart attack.