A research project at the University of Edinburgh, led by Professor Gillian Gray, has been awarded £88,000 by Heart Research UK. Prof Gray’s team has discovered that a drug originally developed to treat obesity and diabetes also promotes repair of the heart after a heart attack and reduces the development of heart failure.
Now the team will use ‘mass spectrometry imaging’ (MSI) to look in more detail at the effects of the drug on the heart muscle.
Heart attacks occur when the blood flow to the heart is interrupted, causing damage that can weaken the heart and lead to heart failure. The new drug that has been discovered acts early after heart attack to prevent the spread of injury in the heart muscle and therefore has the potential to benefit many patients.
As obese and diabetic people are at higher risk of heart attack, the combined actions of the drug on the heart, fat and insulin make it particularly appealing.
The drug has already undergone safety tests in volunteers, so could now rapidly progress to human trials. However, the research team will first need to show that this new drug offers benefits over existing drugs used to treat heart failure.
To do this, the team will use MSI to further investigate the effects the drug has on the heart. It is anticipated that this will provide unique evidence that the biochemical pathways in the heart muscle affected by the drug are distinct from those affected by drugs already used to treat heart failure.
MSI uses a laser to collect samples from slices of tissues. Levels of substances in the body like cortisol and cholesterol breakdown products, that we expect to change after a heart attack and in response to the drug, can be measured in each spot targeted by the laser. This information can then be used to build a map of where they are found.
The MSI group, led by collaborator Professor Ruth Andrew, have already used this technique to visualise and measure activity of the enzyme targeted by the drug in the brain, liver and kidney.
They will prepare thin sections of heart muscle and use the laser to capture samples from injured areas and compare these to samples from healthy areas. MSI has enormous potential for helping to understand biochemical pathways in the heart but has never been systematically applied to heart tissue before.
Kate Bratt-Farrar, Chief Executive of Heart Research UK, said: “We’re very happy to be able to award one of our Novel and Emerging Technologies Grants to Professor Gray and her team.
“This project will generate novel MSI data from heart tissue which will provide vital information on how the drug affects the heart, and we’re proud to be a part of it.”
You can read more about and apply for Heart Research UK’s Research Grants here.
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