Dr. Ot Bakermans and Dr. Jeroen Jeneson, affiliated with Amsterdam Cardiovascular Sciences (ACS) and of the Department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine at the Amsterdam UMC have secured US$ 1.4M of funding from the National Heart, Lung, And Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States.
A joint research project
They receive this funding for their contribution to "Multi Scale Systems Analysis of Metabolic and Mechanical Determinants of Reserve Cardiac Power Output", a joint research project (total budget US$ 3M) lead by Prof Daniel Beard, the Carl J. Wiggers Collegiate Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology at the Department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The funding is for a period of five years
Exercise stress in MRI scanner
Dr. Bakermans and Dr. Jeneson will lead the efforts at the Department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, collecting detailed anatomical and physiological data of the human heart, vasculature and skeletal muscle under exercise stress using Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Spectroscopy. These data will be used to identify and validate personalized computational models of the human cardiovascular system developed by the groups of Prof. Beard and co-investigator Dr. David Nordsletten at the University of Michigan.
Tailoring treatment approaches
The overall objective of the project is to untangle the contributions of intrinsic cardiac factors (energy shortage, mechanical failure) and extrinsic peripheral factors (vasodilation, oxygen transport) to exercise intolerance in heart failure, which will help to tailor treatment approaches to the individual patient.