Great news for our institute and the whole consortium!
We succeeded to get funded jointly by the BHF and DZHK (2.4 Mio € in total for 4 years).
In 2018, for the first time, the British Heart Foundation (BHF) and DZHK came together to create a partnership research funding scheme to encourage international collaboration between cardiovascular researchers in the UK and Germany.
The aim was to fund innovative cardiovascular research with the potential for improved clinical diagnosis, prevention or treatment.
Together with colleagues from Munich (Heri Schunkert, Christian Weber) and UK (Shu Ye, John Danesh) Hugh Watkins and I will work on “Genetic discovery-based targeting of the vascular interface in atherosclerosis”.
This collaborative project aims to help understand how our genes affect our risk of heart disease. Studies involving large groups of people with and without heart disease have identified changes in the DNA code that are more frequent in people with the disease. We found many of these DNA changes are in genes involved in the wall of our blood vessels, an essential biological system in the development of heart disease. We will combine innovative computational and experimental methods to investigate these genes in great detail to understand how exactly they affect disease risk, and to translate this knowledge into new treatments (lay summary taken from grant application).
