Dear all,

I’d like to welcome you to the new British Heart Foundation Cambridge Centre for Cardiovascular Research Excellence annual meeting. As many of you may know, the centre was renewed by the BHF in January last year and started last October. For those new to the centre, its major focus is training the next generation of research scientists through a range of transition fellowships designed to support them to independent personal funding. The Centre can also introduce them to the power of multidisciplinary research into some of the most important causes of death in the world. The 5 new themes are: 

• Mobilising and translating discoveries from multi-omic cohorts 

• Targeting inflammation in cardiovascular disease 

• Advanced therapeutics for cardiac repair and regeneration 

• Cardiometabolic syndromes: Exposome and molecular mechanisms Linking Obesity, Diabetes, HFpEF, NAFLD, and NASH 

• Applied Cardiovascular Health Research 

As well as people, the centre supports small projects through pump priming awards designed to get pilot data for substantive applications, and several larger multidisciplinary longer-term scientific programmes. The Centre also supports our education, public engagement and outreach programmes, to communicate our research to the wider public.  

This year’s programme showcases some of our new Fellows and the broad range of research we support, and we are also delighted to welcome our distinguished lecturers and staff from the BHF. Finally, I would like to thank Jane and Denise our Centre Manager and Cambridge Cardiovascular Research Coordinator respectively, who have worked tirelessly to manage everyone and everything involved, and everyone else who helped organise, chair sessions, judge abstracts, and coordinate parallel sessions, who are critical to the Centre’s success. 

I hope you enjoy our 2025 annual symposium.  

Martin Bennett   

Director, British Heart Foundation Cambridge Centre for Cardiovascular Research Excellence