Science
European funders commit over 5 million euros for research into heart and circulatory diseases
Leading mid-career researchers from the UK, Germany and the Netherlands will collaborate on projects to accelerate progress in the detection and treatment of heart and circulatory diseases. This is all thanks to our ambitious partnership with the German Centre for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK) and Dutch Heart Foundation (DHF).
Together with our European partners, we have awarded more than €5.3 million (£4.7 million) over four years for four international teams to discover new ways to treat different types of heart failure, tackle atherosclerosis – the leading cause of heart attacks and strokes – and deep-dive into thousands of proteins to ultimately give doctors even better risk prediction and management tools.
These awards build on the success of three previous rounds of the funders’ partnership, with the new round specifically supporting mid-career researchers in combining their complementary skills and resources to tackle critical questions in cardiovascular medicine.
The funding will provide them with a springboard to not only make significant scientific advances but also accelerate their development towards becoming international leaders in their chosen fields of research.
'Critically important for progress'
Professor Metin Avkiran, our Associate Medical Director, said: “The BHF-DZHK-DHF joint funding scheme has been hugely successful so far. We’re delighted to be working with our German and Dutch partners once again to fund innovative research into cardiovascular diseases of unmet need, this time also supporting impactful and hopefully lasting collaborations among emerging leaders.
“International collaboration is critically important for scientific progress. Working in partnership with the DHF and DZHK allows the money that we invest in research to go further so that we can achieve more for people with heart and circulatory conditions than we would be able to alone.”
What cross-European projects has the BHF funded?
The four new projects funded by the European partnership, which also involves several co-applicants and collaborators in each country, are:
PLAK-TALK – Understanding cell-to-cell communication to prevent heart attack- and stroke-causing arterial blockages
Principal investigators: Professor Lars Maegdefessel, Technical University Munich; Dr Jason Tarkin, University of Cambridge; Professor Marit Westerterp, University Medical Center Groningen.
Most people who have a heart attack or stroke are unaware that they have an underlying condition before they start developing symptoms. New and improved ways of detecting those at risk of these potentially life-threatening events and preventing them from happening is urgently needed.
Specific cells in the immune system which cause inflammation are known to increase the risk of “fatty plaques” developing in arteries that are likely to rupture and cause a clot that blocks blood flow to the heart or brain.
The PLAK-TALK team will study how specific immune cells called T cells communicate with other cells in protective ‘caps’ covering fatty plaques, to regulate the caps’ stability. These new insights could help design new treatments to ultimately prevent plaques from rupturing and breaking off, and stop devastating heart attacks and strokes from striking.
PROMETHEUS – Revealing genetic clues for why some hearts are unable to adapt to dangerously high blood pressure in the lungs.
Principal investigators: Dr Frances S. de Man, Amsterdam University Medical Center; Professor Soni Pullamsetti, Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research; Dr Andrew Swift, University of Sheffield
Failure of the right side of the heart to function as it should is the leading cause of death in people with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), a condition where blood pressure in lung arteries is dangerously high. The right main chamber of the heart, which pumps blood through lung arteries, needs to adapt to pumping against the high pressure that it encounters in people with PAH.
However, for unknown reasons, the hearts of some patients with PAH are unable to adapt and this can lead to right heart failure. The PROMETHEUS team will investigate specific genetic differences that might determine the right heart’s ability to adapt to pressure overload, to help find new ways of preventing heart failure in PAH.
Prot4CVD – Protein deep-dive to improve cardiovascular disease risk prediction and management
Principal investigators: Professor Adam Butterworth, University of Cambridge; Professor Claudia Langenberg, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin.
Cardiovascular diseases, particularly heart attacks and strokes, are the leading cause of death worldwide.
The Prot4CVD team plan to analyse measurements of thousands of proteins in blood from 200,000 people, in tandem with their genetic and clinical data, using new computational methods to identify proteins that can help predict the likelihood of having a heart attack or stroke.
They also hope to pinpoint proteins that cause people to have heart attacks or strokes, providing ideas for new treatments. These analyses have not been performed at a comparable scale previously and the team expect their findings to help improve the prevention and management of devastating cardiovascular diseases.
MegaCardiocyte - Mapping a blood-bone marrow-heart axis to identify new drug targets for heart failure
Principal investigators: Dr Mairi Brittan, University of Edinburgh; Dr Judith Cosemans, CARIM Maastricht University; Dr Tobias Petzold, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Heart failure is a debilitating and progressive disease that has no cure and is often lethal. For a particular type of heart failure which arises from an impaired ability of the heart’s chambers to relax between beats, abnormal function of small blood vessels is likely to be an important triggering factor.
The MegaCardiocyte consortium will explore the link between small blood vessel function and that type of heart failure. They suspect it might be attributed to malfunctioning blood platelets – normally responsible for clotting – that, together with an overactivation of immune cells in the blood, compromise the ability of small blood vessels in the heart to work normally.
The work may lead to the development of platelet-targeted treatments in the prevention and management of heart failure.