Finding needles in the haystack: Clinician-scientists discover new biomarkers to predict heart failure after a heart attack
Published: 11 Sep 2020
New heart failure biomarkers found: A new study published in “Circulation”, conducted by Associate Professor Mark Chan and Professor A. Mark Richards from the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, combined two powerful new technologies: large-scale plasma proteomics and single cell transcriptomics. This ground-breaking work led to the discovery of new biomarkers and potential treatment targets to prevent heart failure from happening after a heart attack.
The duo, who are also Senior Consultants of the Department of Cardiology at the National University Heart Centre, Singapore, performed plasma proteomics, measuring more than 1,300 proteins in banked blood samples from 500 patients in New Zealand and 200 patients in Singapore. They finally found six “highest-priority” proteins. Two were already well-established biomarkers of heart failure after a heart attack. These could help to identify the patients at high risk of developing heart failure, allow for earlier medical intervention and perhaps prevent heart failure from occurring.
Assoc Prof Chan and colleagues are now collaborating with biomedical engineers to develop ‘lab-on-chip’ devices to measure these proteins for user-friendly detection. Prof Richards has also completed work on some of these proteins showing that modifying their effect can accelerate recovery of heart function after a heart attack.
Strong and reliable signals, identifying those patients who are unfortunate enough to incur heart failure following their heart attack, remain an urgent need,” said Prof Richards. “This work, the result of bilateral and inter-disciplinary collaboration, all skillfully coordinated by Assoc Prof Mark Chan, has taken us an important step closer to being able to step in post-heart attack and more fully protect patients from further harm.”
Added Assoc Prof Chan, “As a cardiologist who has spent a lot of time looking after patients with heart attacks in the last 10 years, it is disheartening to see patients develop heart failure even after performing emergency angioplasty for them in double-quick time. Paradoxically, by saving more lives, emergency angioplasty has actually led to more patients having heart failure after surviving a heart attack. This research would not have been possible 10 years ago but recent technology has enabled us to measure thousands of blood proteins at once with large-scale plasma proteomics and sequence tens of thousands of RNA fragments one cell at a time with single-cell RNA sequencing, helping us to save time by focusing on the targets that matter most to predict and possibly find new treatments for heart failure after a heart attack. A big thank you to the 19 colleagues who worked tirelessly with me to deliver this important discovery.”
