University College London Awarded 1M to Advance Heart, PH Research Using Computational Biology – Pulmonary Hypertension News

To help those with heart and circulatory disorders live longer and better lives, the British Heart Foundation(BHF) has awarded the University College London (UCL) a 1 million grant (about $1.28 million) over five years.

Specifically, funding from the BHF Research Accelerator Award will help UCL build a research team that will focus on data science and computational biology using biological data to develop mathematical models to understand biology.

Part of the funding will be used to strengthen and grow vital National Health Service (NHS) partnerships beyond University College London Hospitals, including with theRoyal Free Hospital a national referral center for pulmonary hypertension. That hospital is part of the Royal Free London, which has wide experience in all types of pulmonary hypertension, and provides support to other U.K. centers.

Led by Aroon Hingorani, director of theUCL Institute of Cardiovascular Science, the team will focus on machine learning to develop tools and insights necessary to better predict, diagnose, and treat heart and circulatory diseases, including disorders such as pulmonary hypertension, or PH.

We are thrilled to be recipients of a 1M five-year UCL BHF Research Accelerator Award, Hingorani said in a BHF press releasewritten by Kosta Pandos.

The UCL Accelerator has been designed with the purpose of fostering multidisciplinary collaboration across UCL faculties, coalescing expertise in cardiovascular and population science, health informatics, computer science, engineering and computational biology through jointly supervised academic posts, Hingorani added.

The funding will benefit several digital healthcare projects, including ones using artificial intelligence.

Unlike traditional research grants, which fund specific projects, both the BHF Accelerator and Research Excellence awardssupport more general work in research institutions, enabling faster research advancement. The Accelerator Award is meant to attract early-career scientists to pioneering research in the fields of heart and circulatory disease.

Despite the medical advances powered by research, 420 people in the UK [United Kingdom] still die every day because of heart and circulatory diseases, said Metin Avkiran, BHFs associate medical director. Thats why were continuing to invest in research and supporting our scientists to make new life-saving discoveries.

Considered a rare disease, pulmonary hypertension is estimated to affect one to two individuals per million each year in the U.S., with a similar incidence in Europe. In 2016, it was estimated that6,000 to 7,000people in the U.K. had the disease.

Mary M. Chapman began her professional career at United Press International, running both print and broadcast desks. She then became a Michigan correspondent for what is now Bloomberg BNA, where she mainly covered the automotive industry plus legal, tax and regulatory issues. A member of the Automotive Press Association and one of a relatively small number of women on the car beat, Chapman has discussed the automotive industry multiple times of National Public Radio, and in 2014 was selected as an honorary judge at the prestigious Cobble Beach Concours dElegance. She has written for numerous national outlets including Time, People, Al-Jazeera America, Fortune, Daily Beast, MSN.com, Newsweek, The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press. The winner of the Society of Professional Journalists award for outstanding reporting, Chapman has had dozens of articles in The New York Times, including two on the coveted front page. She has completed a manuscript about centenarian car enthusiast Margaret Dunning, titled Belle of the Concours.

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Patrcia holds her PhD in Medical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases from the Leiden University Medical Center in Leiden, The Netherlands. She has studied Applied Biology at Universidade do Minho and was a postdoctoral research fellow at Instituto de Medicina Molecular in Lisbon, Portugal. Her work has been focused on molecular genetic traits of infectious agents such as viruses and parasites.

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University College London Awarded 1M to Advance Heart, PH Research Using Computational Biology - Pulmonary Hypertension News