The Bristol team are part of the MRC/BHF funded CoRE in Advanced Cardiac Therapies Centre. Co-funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF) and involving scientists from King’s College London (KCL), Edinburgh, Oxford and Bristol, the Centre will focus on developing and testing new gene therapies for heart disease.
The aim is to discover and target key processes within the heart tissue, which can stimulate the proliferation of heart muscle cells, encourage the growth of new blood vessels, and counteract the formation of scars.
Researchers from KCL, Edinburgh and Oxford plan to achieve this using therapies based on nucleic acids — the building blocks of our genetic material DNA and RNA. These will include mRNA, similar to the cutting-edge techniques in the Covid-19 vaccines, and small regulatory RNAs. These will be identified through genetic screening. The project plan is to use viral and non-viral based technologies to deliver these therapeutic DNAs and RNAs into the cells of the heart with a view to alter the cell’s functions, for example to switch a function on or off, or to stimulate cardiac cell regeneration.
Bristol’s heart scientists will undertake advanced testing of the most promising of these discoveries at its Translational Biomedical Research Centre (TBRC), the only UK-based large animal preclinical facility MHRA compliant for toxicology and medical device testing. The focus will be to generate high-quality feasibility and safety data allowing one or more novel therapies, tested in models of heart attack or heart failure, to receive regulatory approval for clinical trials during the first seven years of the programme.