NIH https://nih.gov awarded Cleveland Clinic https://www.clevelandclinic.org $14.2 million for Atrial Fibrillation (AF) research. The 5 year award will support 4 projects aimed at improving and finding new treatments for patients with AF which is the most common heart rhythm abnormality.
There are more than 6 million in the U.S. living with AF, an irregular rhythm in the heart’s upper chambers. That number is expected to rise to 12.1 million by 2030. When untreated, AF doubles the risk of heart related death and increases the chance of a stroke five-fold.
Mina Chung, M.D. in the Cleveland Clinic’s Department of Cardiovascular Medicine in the Heart, Vascular, and Thoracic Institute, and the Department of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Sciences in the Lerner Research Institute said, “This grant will help to translate genomic discoveries in the lab to provide novel therapeutics for patients.”
Dr. Chung and a multidisciplinary team aim to identify genomic and molecular mechanisms underlying AF to better understand the physiologic processes associated with development of the disease and progression. The researchers will work to identify causal genes associated with AF and investigate disease mechanisms to find therapeutic targets and identify potential new drugs.
As part of the project, researchers will leverage biorepository samples, engineered heart tissues, and experimental models of spontaneous AF, to examine the role of common genetic variants, obesity, diet and the gut microbiome.
The researchers will also use novel artificial intelligence-based algorithms to find and test existing drugs that can be repurposed for AF and then develop a pipeline for testing these drugs.