How BHF-funded research is making a difference.
The BHF is committed to funding research that will beat heartbreak forever — benefiting people living with heart and circulatory conditions. Every year, we monitor the impact of the research we fund, whether it making discoveries that will help us tackle conditions in the future, or changes in clinical practices that will improve the lives of people living with those conditions.
What do we measure?
Every year, we ask our funded researchers to report the outcomes of their research , whether it is publishing their findings in scientific journals, collaborations set up to share expertise or engaging with the public to spread their research. We then pool the data together to perform an in-depth analysis of the research we fund, taking a look at the financial year 2017–2018.
Helping doctors make better treatment decisions after a heart attack
BHF Professor Sven Plein and his team found that a quantitative heart scanning technique using MRI may be more accurate for defining irreversibly damaged and ‘at risk’ areas of the heart following a heart attack than the standard ‘late gadolinium’ enhancement MRI technique. These findings provide additional information about how a person might recover after a heart attack and could help improve treatment decisions.
This research was published in the scientific journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Imaging and is one of over 1600 new scientific articles published by BHF-funded researchers in 2017. We encourage our researchers to publishing their findings in freely available scientific journals to be made available to the broader scientific community and to the public to maximise its reach and benefit.
Money makes money
We fund research to beat heartbreak forever — but it takes time and many players. To keep developing their research, BHF-funded researchers can request further funding from the BHF but also from other charities or public and private sector research investors.
Dr Mathilda Mommersteeg received funding from the BHF in 2015 to explore how some fish can repair their hearts after damage when humans can’t, in the hope of revealing new ways to promote heart repair in people. Her findings funded by the BHF helped her secure further funding from the European Research Council totalling around £1.3 million to continue her research. This grant will help Dr Mommersteeg further understand the molecular mechanisms involved in the regeneration of heart muscle and will enable her to look for drugs which could trigger these regenerative mechanisms. The ultimate aim is to find a way of repairing damaged heart muscle after a heart attack.
This project is part of a total of £39.6 million in further investments leveraged by BHF-funded researchers in 2017 from government, industries or other charities, to fund research to solve the biggest challenges in heart and circulatory conditions.
Translating findings from the lab to the clinic
The BHF is keen to see researchers translate their findings in the lab into new therapies or diagnostic tools with a chance to impact the lives of people affected by heart and circulatory diseases. Successfully translating research in to this sort of benefit often involves protecting research findings with patents or creating commercial companies to help develop the work.
Dr Helen Philippou in Leeds received funding from the BHF in 2012 to develop a new anti-clotting drug that doesn’t cause bleeding, a serious side-effect of current treatments. This work, along with projects funded by Wellcome and MRC has progressed the goal significantly, identifying a series of potent and selective potential drugs. The University of Leeds formed a company in April 2018, Lunac Therapeutics, who will look to raise significant investment to continue the development of the drug so that it can be tested in clinical trials.
Professor Charalambos Antoniades and the University of Oxford formed a company, Caristo Diagnostics in 2018 to develop a test to detect which atherosclerotic plaques –fatty deposits on the lining of blood vessel walls- could lead to heart attack or stroke. They raised £2 million from a consortium of investors to continue the development of this new test.
In 2018, one new company was launched and 16 new patents were filed by BHF-funded researchers. Two companies created on the back of BHF-funded research also raised major investments to continue the development of medical technologies to help beat heartbreak from heart and circulatory conditions.
Improving the lives of people living with Marfan syndrome
The BHF funded the AIMS trial led by Dr Michael Mullen to test whether a drug called irbesartan might slow the expansion of the aorta in people with Marfan syndrome. People with this condition often have an enlargement in the main artery in the body — the aorta — where it connects to the heart. This weakens the blood vessel, increasing the risk of a life-threatening rupture. The results were presented at the 2018 European Society of Cardiology meeting and suggest that irbesartan may delay or totally remove the need for preventive surgery for these people. These findings have the potential to improve the care of people living with Marfan syndrome.
Six BHF-funded clinical trials reported their findings in 2018. It is important to monitor the outputs of clinical trials to see whether they have helped change clinical guidelines and, or, improve the care of people with heart or circulatory diseases.
Sugar taxes
The research we fund can also help inform public health policy to help fight and prevent the burden of heart and circulatory diseases within the society.
For example, in 2015, Professor Peter Scarborough and colleagues received funding from the BHF to study the burden of cardiovascular disease and associated risk factors in the United Kingdom, and how public health interventions could impact this. His work used mathematical modelling to explore the potential impact of taxes on sugary drinks and was used by Public Health England when they reviewed options for reducing how much sugar children eat and drink.
His work contributed to the development of the Sugar Drink Industry Levy in the 2016 budget, dubbed the ‘sugar tax’ or ‘fizzy drinks tax’, which has become a key part of government strategy against childhood obesity. It came into force in April 2018.
In 2017, BHF researchers influenced national and international policy 38 times.
Engaging with the public
The BHF encourages researchers to engage with the public, to communicate and promote BHF-funded research through institutional open days, talks at schools, participation in fundraising events, science festivals, blogging or any contact with the media. In 2017 alone, BHF researchers participated in almost 500 engagement activities.
Many BHF-funded researchers and BHF Professors participated to the 2017 edition of Pint of Science, a science festival that aims to communicate scientific research to the public by bringing scientists to the pub or other public places throughout the UK. Among other presenters, BHF Professor Paul Riley from the University of Oxford talked about ‘Adult heart repair and regeneration’ and Dr Racheela Khan from the University of Nottingham spoke about ‘Pregnancy and the timing of birth’.
Supporting diversity
At the end of March 2018, the BHF was supporting 1,200 active research staff across the UK.
The BHF is committed to supporting and developing the careers of all those involved in cardiovascular research and recognises the value and importance of ‘Team Science’. We closely monitor our scientific workforce and support many different types of research careers.
To further support the diversity of the types of researchers it funds, the BHF has developed two new fellowship schemes, with the help of the wider health research community, to empower the women and men who already help deliver treatments and care to people with heart and circulatory diseases. The Research Training Fellowships and Career Development Research Fellowships for Nurses and Allied Health Professionals schemes could deliver the next big breakthroughs in care.
Our funded researchers are world leaders. In 2017 alone, 401 researchers told us that they had received an awards or recognition, including Professor Lucilla Poston at King’s College London, who was awarded a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her services to women’s health and Dr Andrew Sage from the University of Cambridge who won a Young Investigator Award from the European Atherosclerosis Society.
This was a glimpse into the achievements of a small fraction of BHF-funded research and how we are striding towards beating heartbreak forever. It came from a larger collection of just over 1400 awards. All this amazing work couldn’t have been done without the generous donations from our supporters and with your help, we will keep funding this kind of life-saving research.
If you liked this, you might also like:
- From firefighters to fish oils: how BHF-funded clinical trials are making a difference
- Nurses, midwives and healthcare professionals — the teams behind research in cardiovascular care
And don’t forget to follow the BHF publication on Medium.
Where do donations go? was originally published in British Heart Foundation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
