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Calum MacRae, Harvard Medical School associate professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and an international team of collaborators have been selected from among hundreds of applicants to receive the One Brave Idea Research Award.
This five-year, $75 million award from the American Heart Association, Verily Life Sciences (formerly Google Life Sciences) and AstraZeneca will support innovative, joint initiatives that seek a cure for coronary heart disease (CHD).
MacRae, chief of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at Brigham and Women’s, along with collaborators, aims to define the earliest genetic and molecular markers of CHD in order to prevent the disease’s onset and to build a lasting global consortium to support CHD investigations.
Elazer Edelman, HMS professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s, joins MacRae as a collaborator and member of the international team dedicated to this research. Edelman is a professor in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program and director of the Harvard-MIT Biomedical Engineering Center.
“Decades before we see the devastating consequences of coronary heart disease, biological changes are happening that can eventually lead to coronary obstruction, heart failure and sudden death. Our ambition is to redefine coronary heart disease by pinpointing the very first changes so that we can detect them in the entire population at an earlier age,” said MacRae.
“We have assembled a diverse core team of investigators who are committed to working across traditional boundaries to transform our understanding of CHD and translate those findings into better patient care. I am deeply grateful to my collaborators and to the American Heart Association, Verily and AstraZeneca for sharing in this vision,” he said.
MacRae and leaders from MIT, the Stanford University Data Science Initiative, Northeastern University, the Million Veteran Program, University of Toronto and Boston University School of Medicine along with advice from Atlas Venture, will look beyond traditional markers such as LDL cholesterol and C-reactive protein to identify upstream biologic or cellular traits, as well as behavioral features, that have a clear genetic basis which can be used as earlier, more definitive biomarkers of coronary heart disease.
The team will begin by studying families with premature CHD. They will then validate novel traits and associations by looking at much larger populations from the Framingham Heart Study and Million Veteran Program while continuing to expand on them by using online tools to recruit families and cohorts. Finally, the team will define preventative therapeutic strategies that can be tested in large, simple trials.
“Alone, each of our organizations has helped to transform our understanding of coronary artery disease. Yet, for all the success we have had, there has been no legacy of resources upon which to continue building,” said MacRae.
“Our project will create a global consortium to support programs from idea conception to clinical realization and establish a lasting resource for future research endeavors in cardiovascular and other chronic disease,” he added.
In the final phase of the research, MacRae and his team will focus on developing novel preventative or pre-disease therapeutic strategies with the ultimate goal of reducing the burden of CHD. MacRae’s work not only upholds the mission of strong collaboration and a continuous search for new knowledge at HMS, but also extends Brigham and Women’s long tradition as a leader in cardiology, innovative research and patient care.
“Calum’s vision of how we approach CHD from both a research perspective and diagnostic perspective is inspiring and embodies our hospital’s commitment to scalable innovation and to discoveries that can transform patient care,” said Betsy Nabel, president of Brigham and Women’s Health Care.
The core group of investigators and advisors leading this work include the following:
- Euan Ashley, director of the Stanford Center for Inherited Cardiovascular Disease and a member of the Stanford Data Science Initiative;
- Alberto-Lázló Barabási, director of the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University;
- Elazer Edelman, HMS professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, director of the Harvard-MIT Biomedical Engineering Center, a professor in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program and cardiovascular medicine specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital
- J. Michael Gaziano, HMS professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s, chief of the Division of Aging at Brigham and Women’s, and a principal investigator for the Million Veteran Program;
- David Grayzel, partner at Atlas Venture;
- Christopher O’Donnell, HMS associate professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s, chief of cardiology, VA Boston Healthcare System, scientific director of the Million Veteran Program, and chief of Cardiovascular Epidemiology and Human Genomics Branch at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute;
- Frederick Roth, the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Integrative Biology at the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research and a senior investigator at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Sinai Health System;
- Vasan Ramachandran, principal investigator of the Framingham Heart Study, chief of the Section of Preventative Medicine and Epidemiology at Boston University School of Medicine
