UCLA Department of Medicine Chair and Executive Medical Director E. Dale Abel, MD, PhD and colleagues from the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) in Madrid, University of Copenhagen and Kings College London are the recipients of a six-year European Research Council (ERC) Synergy Grant valued at a total of €10,176,526 ($11.7 million), with €2,118,750 ($2.4 million) budgeted for UCLA.
"The nidus for this team proposal began over lunch with Dr. Guadalupe Sabio from CNIO at a conference in Lisbon 18 months ago," said Abel. "Professor Sabio then brought together Professors Jesper Velgaard Olsen from the University of Copenhagen and Mauro Giacca, King’s College London to tackle an important question, namely how does obesity increase the risk of heart failure. It is a privilege to be a member of this consortium and an honor to see that our concepts were recognized by the European Union in a rigorous and competitive process. We are hopeful that our studies may identify new targets for treating or preventing prevent heart failure.”
The grant, titled "Adipohealth,” will be used to study the mechanisms underlying the connection between obesity and heart disease, with a specific focus on the contribution of adipose tissue (AT) dysfunction. Early research findings from Dr. Abel and his collaborators suggest that obesity-driven changes in the secretion of AT metabokines — proteins, peptides, metabolites and extracellular vesicles — damage heart metabolism. The goals of their work under the Adipohealth grant include the integration of multi-omics data to identify novel AT metabokines that regulate heart cell metabolism or contribute to heart disease; the use of mouse models to demonstrate how changes in metabokines alter cardiac function; the functional characterization of metabokines in cell culture, mouse models and human samples; and the development of therapeutic strategies to target AT dysfunction and metabokine-induced cardiac damage.
“Our results not only will deepen our understanding of metabolic crosstalk between organs but will also identify new therapeutic targets to combat cardiometabolic diseases,” the team said.
ERC Synergy grants fund ambitious projects across all scientific fields that aim to solve large problems that require multiple principal investigators, at least one of whom must be based in the European Union. The awards are highly competitive; of 701 evaluated proposals in this year’s round, only 66 were selected for funding. Past funded projects include a new ophthalmic imaging technology, a model for cellular organization and a camera to take pictures of black holes.
