Heart failure is a condition in which the heart, as result of injury, becomes less efficient at pumping blood round the body. It is estimated that nearly 23 million people have heart failure worldwide. Heart failure, which consumes 1% to 2% of the healthcare budget in theUK, is a major burden to patients, health care providers and society.
Despite recent advances in our understanding of how to optimise the treatment of heart failure from clinical trials, patients still die from heart failure and many patients have a poor quality of life with symptoms of shortness of breath and lethargy. This is because patients are individuals and therefore not all patients with heart failure will derive the same overall benefit that is seen in clinical trial populations. While some patients may derive the desired response from heart failure medications, others may have no benefit at all and may even experience harmful side effects. In other words, there is a need for treatment to be ‘tailored’ to the individual patient. There is increasing evidence that genes can play an important role in inter-individual differences in response to drug therapy. Understanding an individual's personal genetic profile may help in doctors in the future to make heart failure medicine more personalized to ensure that every individual benefits maximally from their medicine while reducing the chance of unwanted side effects.
A team lead by Prof Chim Lang, Professor of Cardiology at the University of Dundee have been working on making personalized medicine a reality for patients with heart failure. This team that includes hospital physicians (Dr Alex Doney, Professor Allan Struthers and Professor Andrew Morris), a general practitioner (Professor Bruce Guthrie) and geneticist (Professor Colin Palmer) have been awarded a £750,000 grant as part of a £10 million award by the European commission Seventh Framework Programme (FP-7). Professor Lang is the Work Package Lead for the validation cohort which will support a ground breaking observational study programme (BIOSTAT-CHF) in Tayside that will investigate how an individual's genetic make-up influences their unique response to heart failure medication. BIOSTAT - CHF Tayside will link up with other partners acrossEurope to work out how this information can be used to optimise the treatment of heart failure for each individual.
Prof Chim Lang says ‘BIOSTAT-CHF is a major step towards making personalized medicine a reality in patients with heart failure. It has the potential to lead to greater efficacy in treated patients, fewer side effects and better disease management, which in turn will lead to better outcome and reduced health costs’.