An international team of researchers has been announced to lead a major new global research programme aiming to accelerate improvements in women’s heart health.
The $55m VISIBLE programme from Wellcome Leap - jointly funded by Pivotal with support from BHF – aims to transform the diagnosis and treatment of a heart condition that disproportionately affects women.
The condition is coronary microvascular disease, which affects the heart’s smallest blood vessels. It doesn’t show up on invasive heart tests called angiograms, which means it is often missed.
A common symptom is stable chest pain, or angina, which at least 60 million women globally live with. Medicine typically uses an angiogram to look for one of the most common diagnoses in men, which is coronary heart disease, due to a blockage or narrowing in a major coronary artery.
However, each year, hundreds of thousands of women with angina undergo an angiogram only to leave without a diagnosis because they don’t have any obvious blockages. They may be told their arteries look “normal”, that their hearts are healthy, and that it might be anxiety.
VISIBLE aims to close this diagnostic gap, by bringing together a global, interdisciplinary team of researchers who will work together to transform how coronary microvascular disease is diagnosed and treated.
The team will be led by 12 principal investigators, who come from the UK, the Netherlands, Tanzania, Australia and the United States. Among them is Colin Berry, Professor of Cardiology and Imaging at the University of Glasgow.
Prof Berry is a BHF-funded researcher, and we have previously funded his work on coronary microvascular disease, including how this condition presents differently in men and women.
The other principal investigators for the programme are:
Professor Hester den Ruijter, UMC Utrecht,
Associate Professor Erin Howden, University of New South Wales,
Dr Peter Kisenge, Jakaya Kikwete Cardiac Institute,
Dr Rebecca McNeil, RTI International,
Professor Venkatesh L. Murthy, University of Michigan,
Dr Paul D. Pang, Greenstone Biosciences, Inc,
Dr Megha Prasad, Columbia University,
Professor Harmony Reynolds, NYU Grossman School of Medicine,
Professor Gregory Roth, University of Washington, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation,
Dr Samit M. Shah, Yale University School of Medicine,
Professor Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, Columbia University.
We’re proud to support VISIBLE, a programme led by Wellcome Leap in partnership with Pivotal, a group of organisations founded by Melinda French Gates.
Professor Bryan Williams OBE, our Chief Scientific and Medical Officer, said: “We have recognised for a long time that there is often something different about the way heart disease manifests in women.
“There are historical gaps in our understanding of biological differences in heart disease between men and women and this new programme of research - led by some of the world’s leading research teams in this area - is a unique opportunity to address these issues head on with targeted research.
"Only with more research can we better understand sex-based differences in cardiovascular health and learn how to better prevent and treat cardiovascular disease in women.
"Joining forces with Wellcome Leap and Pivotal is a great opportunity to unlock transformational change that saves and improves countless women’s lives across the world.”
Read about microvascular angina
