BIOSTAT TAYSIDE CHF is a multidisciplinary research programme for developing personalised medications for patients with heart failure.

Heart Failure is common in Europe and its prevalence is increasing as our population ages. Despite major improvements in care since the early 90s, it is still related to poor prognosis, an impaired quality of life and high health care costs. Many new therapies have failed to further improve outcome. One obvious reason is that the response to treatment is not homogenous but may need to be tailored to the individual patient.

BIOSTAT-CHF aims to identify patients with a poor outcome, despite currently recommended therapy using information on demographics, gender, existing biomarkers, genetics and proteomics. In BIOSTAT-CHF an index cohort of 2500 patients with heart failure, will be recruited and their treatment will be optimised according to the heart failure guidelines of the European Society of Cardiology with diuretics, ACE-inhibitors, beta blockers and aldosterone antagonists.

In Dundee, the BIOSTAT TAYSIDE- CHF team headed by Professor Chim Lang is recruiting an independent CHF population of approximately 2500 for validation and translation of the ‘response to treatment’ integrated model from the Index Cohort. This is a joint venture by the Centre for Cardiovascular & Lung Biology, Centre for Pharmacogenetics & Pharmacogenomics and the Biomedical Research Institute of the University of Dundee. Identifying patients with a poor outcome on currently recommended therapy may lead to further development of targeted therapies, eventually leading to improvements in outcome for patients with heart failure in Europe.

BIOSTAT-CHF will therefore be a major step towards personalised medicine. The final outcome of this project is to tailor the choice of medication and dosing in individual patients with heart failure and to develop drugs with narrower and more targeted therapeutic actions. This project has been awarded a grant by the European commission Seventh Framework Programme (FP-7).

(Video Originated by CoriellInstitute)