Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Management of heart failure is costly and it affects a large number of people. While some patients appear to recover from the symptomatic phase of heart failure, their treatment is continued because there are no guidelines for assessing whether a person has been cured of heart failure. Thus, clinicians are obligated to continue the standard treatment in order to avoid a relapse of the disease. Biomarkers of cured heart failure would help physicians tailor the treatment to each individual, which could reduce side effects and complications and save healthcare costs. There is a perfect model to study the disease progression related genes and proteins in a different cohort, namely in patients who have been cured of heart failure by means of heart transplantation. Within the Biomarkers in Transplantation initiative we have enrolled and followed heart transplant patients from pre-transplant all the way through three years post-transplant. These patients had end-stage heart failure before transplantation and after receiving a new heart, they are cured of the heart failure. Zsuzsanna Hollander will use transplant patients time course data to discover the genes and proteins that are indicative of cured heart failure. She will then create a biomarker panel containing the genes and proteins that can discriminate between blood samples of patients with and without stable heart function. She will validate the biomarker in patients who have been treated for heart failure using drug therapy instead of transplantation. This work could potentially lead to the personalization of drug therapy for patients who had heart failure but due to medications have stabilized. With time, could even lead to patients being totally weaned off of drugs. This would not only mean huge savings of healthcare costs, but also less medication related complications. Moreover, it would mean a whole new perspective on life for the people who would not have to think of themselves as being ill anymore.