New funding for cardiac shock research

January 2020

The Heart Disease Research Group (ICREC) led by Dr Antoni Bayés Genís has been awarded funding to research cardiac shock. The Heart Disease Research Group (ICREC) led by Dr Antoni Bayés Genís has been awarded funding to research cardiac shock. The project In vitro methods to predict cardiac mortality risks in patients with cardiac shock, has been awarded funding by the Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR) with the support of the European Union.

The project is led by Dr Bayes, with the participation of Dr Oriol Iborra of the same group.

After a coronary artery obstruction, the resultant insufficient blood flow to certain areas of the heart causes cell death and ischemia, commonly known as a heart attack (i.e: Myocardial infarction, MI), which affect ~17 million people worldwide. If the MI extents widely, the body can promote an organic shutdown and enter cardiogenic shock (CS), where cardiac, renal, hepatic and inflammatory systems get uncontrolled. It is a major, difficult, and frequently fatal complication, which requires a rapid and well-organized management. CS develops in ~7% of the MI cases (1.2 million people every year), and is the leading cause of death in acute MI, with mortality rates as high as 50% even in the presence of aggressive, highly experienced technical care. Currently, clinicians do not have efficient prognostic tools that help them manage these emergencies, leaving them with no real information of the potential clinical evolution of such devastating condition.

We used the latest advances in targeted proteomics and analyzed large, validated and independent cohorts, with the aim of finding molecular data that would be useful, simple to use and rapidly transferrable to the clinical setting.

Here, we discovered that with a panel of just 4 proteins (CS4P), we can confidently predict the outcome of a patient entering the emergency room suffering from CS (AUC 0.84).

These results will be used to develop an In Vitro Diagnostic (IVD) that will assist clinicians optimizing treatment and tacking quick life-saving decision, help tackle poor resource allocation (CS accounts for~54B$ annually), envisage new clinical trials in CS and helping patients, and their families, to better cope with the disease evolution.

Funding

This project is funded by the Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR) and cofinanced by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) of the European Union (project number: 2019PROD00122) with 99,999, 21 €.