Damian Tyler has been awarded a renewal of his BHF Senior Fellowship for his research "Building an Imaging Toolbox for Metabolic Heart Disease." The award will fund his lab for the next five years and enable his team to improve diagnostic imaging in heart disease.
The heart requires a huge amount of energy to beat non-stop for the whole of a person's life. When the heart becomes diseased, it is often because something has gone wrong with the way the heart turns the fuels we eat into the energy it needs to beat.
A new approach, called Hyperpolarized magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), allows us to make images that shows exactly how the heart is making this energy from sugars and these images can be used to understand what has gone wrong in certain diseases, such as diabetes and heart attacks.
Damian's project will aim to improve hyperpolarized MRI to make the images clearer and faster. His research will also allow images to be made that show us how the heart uses other fuels, such as fats. These improvements will help doctors to more accurately diagnose heart diseases and to monitor how patients respond to treatments.
I'm delighted to have had my fellowship renewed by the BHF. Their continued support has allowed us to take this exciting new imaging technology from basic principles through to first-in-man trials in patients. We are looking forward to working hard to translate these approaches to make a difference to the clinical care of patients with a wide range of heart diseases. - Professor Damian Tyler