Team led by Roberto Bolli awarded $11.7 million for cardiovascular research
Roberto Bolli, M.D.
A University of Louisville team led by Roberto Bolli, M.D., has been awarded an $11.7 million grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute -- part of the National Institutes of Health -- to build on the Institute of Molecular Cardiology's internationally recognized research into ways the heart can protect itself from tissue damage at the molecular and cellular level.
The award is the largest nationally competitive NIH grant ever given to the University of Louisville.
NIH reviewers, all of whom are top scientists in the field, rated the Bolli team's proposed research program as exceedingly innovative and potentially high-impact, noting that it addresses an extremely important clinical problem in a way that will move treatments from the laboratory to the patient as quickly as possible.
The reviewers called the proposal a "paradigm of what a program project grant should be."
Bolli, recipient of the 2005 Howard Morgan Award for Distinguished Achievements in Cardiovascular Research from the International Academy of Cardiovascular Sciences, is the Jewish Hospital Heart and Lung Institute Distinguished Chair in Cardiology, a position supported through the state's Research Challenge Trust Fund.
The research program has four major components that, according to remarks provided by the NIH, display remarkable synergy in their potential to exponentially move the field forward.
Bolli will lead research into ways to build on the heart's adaptive response to stress -- called late preconditioning -- that provide powerful and sustained protection against tissue damage during a heart attack. Using genetic therapy, Bolli hopes to develop ways to make the heart permanently resistant to tissue damage in patients at high risk of heart attack.
Another component to the research, led by biophysicist Sumanth Prabhu, M.D., will examine the role of three key genes in heart function after a heart attack to determine whether they play a part in protecting against tissue damage. Researchers will examine whether these protective genes work to sustain or improve heart function in the long-term.
Yu-Ting Xuan, Ph.D., a specialist in cellular biology and signal transduction, will lead a team examining the role of a particular signaling pathway in heart attacks and the molecular and genetic factors that determine how the heart may protect itself against tissue damage in the event of a heart attack.
The final component of the research program, led by Aruni Bhatnagar, M.D., will examine the role of mitochondria in cell death and how it can be prevented.
Because mitochondria act as engines that provide fuel for the cell's biological processes, dysfunctional mitochondria lead to cell death. Building on his NIH-funded research in environmental cardiology, Bhatnagar will examine how several biochemical mechanisms may influence mitochondrial function.
Bolli and his UofL colleagues will conduct parts of their research in cooperation with investigators at other institutions, including the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the New York Medical College in New York, the Medical University of South Carolina and Ohio State University.
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death and hospitalization in the United States. The annual total cost of heart disease to our nation is $142.1 billion, according to the American Heart Association.
The NIH expressed high expectations for the research project, citing the exceptional scientific track record created by Bolli and UofL's Institute of Molecular Cardiology, and the selection of project components that have the potential to become more than the sum of their parts. This model of collaborative research should pave the way for genetic therapies and other treatments that will revolutionize how doctors care for patients at risk for heart disease.
Bolli is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Basic Research Prize of the American Heart Association (2001), the MERIT Award from the NIH (2001), the Research Achievement Award from the International Society for Heart Research (2004) and the Lucian Award from McGill University (2004).
