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The Vascular Health Research Centre
9 May 2002
The Vascular Health Research Centre, VHRC, under the leadership of Director, Professor Paul A. Cahill, and Associate Director, Dr. Niall Moyna were the first group in DCU to receive funding under the 'New Blood' programme of matching funds from the Wellcome Trust and the Irish government through the Health Research Board of Ireland. Since the establishment of the Vascular Biology Group in DCU just over two years ago and the recent establishment of the VHRC, the centre has received over €4.5million in outside investment from Enterprise Ireland, Health Research Board, Educational Trust and Albert College Fellowship programmes, The American Health Assistance Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the programme for Research in Third level Institutions (PRTLI Cycle III) in collaboration with the Dublin Molecular Medicine Centre (DMMC).
The VHRC, comprising researchers from the School of Biotechnology, the Centre for Sports and Science and the Centre for the Manufacturing, Engineering and Design, are involved specifically in research to do with vascular disease. Vascular disease is commonly used to describe serious heart conditions, but more precise terms are hypertension and atherosclerosis, they are in fact the major causes of death in the western world. For a long time, the cause of heart attacks seemed so simple, so obvious: Big, nasty clumps of gunk build up on the walls of the heart's arteries. The blood channel grows tortuously narrow. Eventually a clot gets stuck, choking off the flow entirely. Heart muscle starves of blood supply and dies. Now it appears, it is the benign 'vulnerable' build-up of gunk on the arterial wall that predicts a major coronary event. The VHRC mission is to try and understand how the cells of the artery respond to various stimuli [mechanical (exercise), hormonal and dietary] that are responsible for the gunk build-up and the narrowing of blood vessels. The Centre is also pioneering research to design and develop a novel bioartificial vessel implant device that would be used in heart transplant patients. The implant would be generated from the transplantee's own cells and act as an ideal platform for vascular gene therapy to treat this disease.
For further information visit The Vascular Health Research Centre website