Cambridge Festival April 2022
Wednesday 6th April 2022, 6.30-7.30pm virtual via Zoom
Cambridge Cardiovascular at Cambridge Festival 'Future Therapies in Cardiovascular research' Panel
Registration is open at Eventbrite. Zoom Link sent a few days before event.
Panel Discussion
Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death worldwide, taking millions lives each year. Cardiovascular diseases include Stroke, Heart Failure, Aorta Disease and Vascular Disease. The last few decades have seen many successful preventative measures and treatments being developed. These range from highly effective drug therapies to non-pharmacological treatment. Join our team of researchers to discuss their work in the cardiovascular area, and the future therapies being developed to treat these disorders. Each speaker will give a brief overview on their area of research (indicating future therapies) and will open to the floor for discussion and questions..
Chaired by Dr Jason Tarkin, Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Career Development Fellow, Clinical Lecturer
Panel:
Prof Christi Deaton, Professor of Nursing
I will be discussing the following:
How beneficial are lifestyle changes?
Tailoring diet and physical activity to the individual
Delivering and supporting rehabilitation at home
Ensuring that healthcare systems are able to deliver needed therapy
Dr Nick Evans, Consultant in Stroke Medicine
Whilst I will be giving my five minute talk, someone in the UK will have a stroke. It is one of the leading causes of adult disability in the UK and affects not just the individual, but also their families, carers, and healthcare as a whole (with an estimated annual cost to the UK economy of £26bn per annum). I will be discussing our group's work using advanced imaging techniques to improve the detection for the risk of stroke and how this is helping us to develop new treatments, including repurposing existing treatments from other diseases that may help treat strokes.
Dr Tian Zhao, Clinical Lecturer in Cardiovascular Medicine
I am a cardiology doctor and scientist researching new treatments for heart disease. I will talk about the role of the immune system in heart disease and the work we are doing repurposing medicines that are already available to be used in patients with heart disease to target the immune system. I will talk about the advantages of repurposing medicines and some of the challenges involved.
Dr Meritxell Nus, BHF Intermediate Research Fellow
Every 3 minutes a person dies of a heart attack or a stroke in UK, and in the majority of the cases the underlying cause is atherosclerosis (the narrowing of the arteries). Unfortunately, everybody participating in this Panel Discussion might be affected by this disease, as the build up of fatty plaques starts from birth. There is no doubt that changes in lifestyle (like a healthy diet or reducing smoking) and the discovery of lipid lowering therapies (like statins), have decreased the burden of this dreadful disease. But there is a large number of the people for whom these interventions are not enough to protect from artery disease. We now know that atherosclerosis is an inflammatory disease due to an imbalance between pro-inflammatory cells trying to protect the arteries from the accumulation of fats and counter-regulatory mechanisms. There is then an urgent need to find new therapies that can treat the inflammatory component of atherosclerosis in a specific manner. Based on my research on the role of the adaptive immune response and its interaction with diet and gut microbiota (the millions of microorganisms in our guts), I believe that in a few years we will be able to treat atherosclerosis with emerging and more personalized therapies using probiotics, nanoparticles and/or vaccines.