Charalambos Antoniades is the BHF Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Radcliffe Department of Medicine, University of Oxford
Professor Charalambos Antoniades and his team are investigating how fat in our bodies, particularly fat that surrounds our arteries, communicates with our heart and blood vessels, leading to heart attacks and strokes. Understanding this will help them to find new ways to detect, prevent and treat these conditions.
New treatments to reduce complications of diabetes
Heart and circulatory diseases are the biggest cause of death for people with diabetes. High blood sugar levels, a hallmark of diabetes, can damage blood vessels. This increases the chance that people with diabetes will develop atherosclerosis (a build-up of fatty plaques inside their arteries), the biggest cause of heart attacks and strokes.
Professor Antoniades and his team will investigate new treatments that can make arteries respond better to insulin (a hormone that reduces blood sugar levels). They hope that findings from this work will lead to clinical trials to test these treatments in patients with diabetes to determine whether they can reduce the heart and circulatory complications they experience.
Learning more about atherosclerosis
Millions of people in the UK have some degree of atherosclerosis, but not all of these people will have a heart attack or stroke. Understanding more about atherosclerosis could help doctors to step in earlier to offer more personalised treatment to prevent a heart attack from happening.
This work will combine different types of scans to identify which plaques are at highest risk of causing a heart attack.
Professor Antoniades and his team will also investigate how our genes influence the size and make up of plaques and the inflammation surrounding them. They’ll develop a risk score to predict how plaques will progress and they’ll test how well this score is able to predict patient’s outcomes by re-imaging the same people after 5 years.
Discovering new signs of heart and circulatory diseases
7.6 million people in the UK are living with heart and circulatory diseases, and the conditions are responsible for 450 deaths every day. We need better ways to prevent, detect and treat heart and circulatory diseases.
Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is transforming research by allowing us to find patterns in massive amounts of data that would otherwise be impossible for the human brain to spot. Professor Antoniades and his team will use AI to study genetic, molecular and imaging data from thousands of people throughout this programme to look for new markers of heart and circulatory diseases and their outcomes. They hope that this could be useful in future to improve identification and diagnosis of heart and circulatory conditions.