BOSTON Anthony Rosenzweig, MD, Director of Cardiovascular Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), has been named the American Coordinator of a prestigious Transatlantic Network of Excellence grant from the Paris-based Leducq Foundation. The five-year grant, totaling $6 million, will support research on metabolic heart disease.
Emphasizing international collaboration and transatlantic cooperation, the Leducq Foundation developed its Networks of Excellence in Cardiovascular Research Program four years ago to encourage international cooperation and accelerate the pace of discovery in areas relevant to cardiovascular disease. The program pairs investigators from both sides of the Atlantic to reinforce scientific and technological excellence; in this program Rosenzweig and European coordinator Timothy Aitman, MD, PhD, a researcher in the genetics of metabolic disease at Hammersmith Hospital, London, will oversee a consortium of 10 scientific laboratories in both the U.S. and Europe that will focus on understanding the intersection of heart failure and metabolic disease, such as diabetes.
"These are both enormous clinical problems that often occur in tandem," explains Rosenzweig, who is also an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. "Dr. Aitman and I believe that common molecular mechanisms contribute to both, and we hope to unravel these mechanisms so that, ultimately, we can learn how to target them therapeutically."
Titled, "Integrative Networks Regulating Cardiomyocyte Metabolism and Survival in Heart Failure and Insulin Resistance," the grant has three primary goals, according to Rosenzweig: to gain a better understanding of the role and interactions of specific metabolic pathways in the development of heart failure; to use a genomics-based approach to investigate cardiomyocyte metabolism; and to directly test the relevance of these observations to human heart failure and insulin resistance.