Principal Investigator: Dar Dowlatshahi

Unfortunately, sometimes doctors cannot determine why a patient has a stroke or heart disease. Patients are left frustrated by the lack of answers and live in fear of the next attack. This team will use new blood tests and body scans to help identify the cause of disease in these individuals, which may help to prevent any further strokes, heart attacks and heart failure. In other patients, stroke and heart disease can be caused by plaque buildup from long-term inflammation within the blood vessels. Using state of the art blood tests and advanced blood vessel scanners, this team will measure inflammation and use medications to reduce it. These new technologies and approaches will enable physicians and patients to have a better idea about what caused their illness and discover new ways to reduce their risks.

Principal Investigator: Peter Liu

Brain and heart conditions are linked and often occur together. However, they tend to be treated individually and are difficult to detect early. This team will use special proteins in the blood as potential novel tools to help diagnose and determine a person’s risk of developing these conditions. Candidate proteins will be evaluated in blood samples from heart failure patients, many with brain complications, to see which are best predictors of brain-heart complications. The team will then evaluate them in a much larger Ontario Health Study, which involves over 200,000 volunteers, to see which test candidates perform the best, and can be used in the clinic in the future.  The overall aim is to transform how patients with ongoing risks for brain and heart conditions are treated.

Principal Investigator: Adam Shuhendler

If we could detect disease in the brain and heart at the molecular level before these changes are felt by the patient, we could alter the course of disease and possibly prevent irreversible damage. This wish is becoming reality through a revolutionary diagnostic technique called molecular imaging, where minute changes within our cells can be detected with medical imaging technology. This team uses an imaging technique which labels problematic cells that use fructose as a source of energy instead of glucose. By doing this, they have been able to map inflammation in the heart and brain in animal models. The team will now use this technique to evaluate which diseases (e.g., stroke, heart attack, brain cancers) can be diagnosed with this type of imaging, eventually introducing it in human clinical trials.