Feb. 11, 2005
$18 Million grant funds heart failure research
Auburn University will collaborate with the University of Alabama at Birmingham as part of an $18 million National Institutes of Health grant for research into what remains a stubborn, steady killer: congestive heart failure.
UAB was selected as one of five institutions nationwide to lead a national research assault on congestive heart failure, the most unremitting diagnosis in heart disease. A Specialized Center of Clinically Oriented Research, or SCCOR, program will be funded over the next five years to focus on heart failure research. UAB plans to immediately develop a subcontract with Auburn University so that AU's successful research in its Samuel Ginn College of Engineering and College of Veterinary Medicine can be combined with UAB efforts.
For veterinary medicine, this research has direct clinical implications because mitral valve disease is more common than all other canine heart diseases combined.
"Working with UAB, we have developed new therapeutic strategies to immediately improve the quality of life of dogs with heart disease," said Dr. Ray Dillon, Jack Rash Professor of Medicine and the principle investigator on the project in the AU College of Veterinary Medicine. "When we started some of these projects 10 years ago, we had to send the MRI data to an engineering group in New Zealand for computer analysis."
Now, Auburn University has developed the technology and expertise to produce the images and analyze the data on its campus.
The image data will be sent to Thomas Denney, professor of electrical and computer engineering in AU 's Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, for analysis. Denney has developed techniques for quantitatively measuring how much the heart muscle contracts and other indicators of cardiac health from cardiac MRI data. This analysis, combined with serial MRI scans, is expected to revolutionize the understanding of the heart's response to disease.
The SCCOR research targets three types of heart failure: medication resistant hypertension, diabetes and valvular heart disease. Preliminary research has shown these three types of heart disease account for more than 50 percent of patients with heart failure and are resistant to standard medical treatment.
"Understanding these mechanisms could lead to new treatments for those living with chronic heart disease," said Dr. Louis J. Dell'Italia, UAB's primary SCCOR program director, professor of medicine in cardiovascular diseases and the department of physiology and biophysics, and Elmer and Glenda Harris Endowed Chair holder.
"In addition to consistency of data, the idea of the core set-up is to get the best person for the job. It makes more sense for engineers to study the geometry of the heart and for cardiologists to relate these findings to patient symptoms and treatment," Dell'Italia said. "We have pathologists studying tissues, basic scientists studying cells in the lab and veterinarians treating and studying dogs with heart failure.
"As a bonus, an undertaking of this magnitude will also help sick animals living with heart failure, like dogs particularly because of our partnership with Auburn," he added.
Heart failure affects more than 4.7 million people in the United States and includes more than 500,000 new cases each year. Research investments during the past 30 years have largely targeted deaths from ischemic heart disease. As a result, survival rates after heart attacks due to coronary artery disease have significantly improved. In 1963 there were 3,000 centenarians living in the United States and the number has grown to 60,000 in 2004. However, as patients live longer, doctors are now confronted with a new and more debilitating type of heart disease—heart muscle disease or heart failure. The only known cure for this is heart transplantation, but because only a limited number of donor hearts are available each year, heart transplants cannot be the solution to the ever-increasing burden presented by chronic heart failure.
The Cleveland Clinic, Washington University, University of Cincinnati and Columbia University are the other four designated heart failure SCCOR centers.
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