Major funding grant to investigate the diabetic heart
2 April 2019
Cardiovascular complications are the leading cause of mortality in people with type 2 diabetes, and Dr Kenneth Tran from the Auckland Bioengineering Institute has just been awarded $150,000 from the Health Research Council’s Explorer Grant to investigate why.
Diabetes affects six percent of the New Zealand population, 26 percent are diagnosed with pre-diabetes, and more than 90 percent of diabetic sufferers in New Zealand have type 2 diabetes.
“The prevalence has risen at seven percent per year for the past eight years and is heavily skewed towards the Māori and Pacific Island cohorts, who are three times more likely to develop diabetes,” says Dr Tran.
Diabetic heart failure is a chronic condition that manifests in a diminished capacity to pump blood around the body.
However, despite many decades of research the underlying cause for the weakening of the diabetic heart is not well understood.
“At the moment, we are unsure as to why the heart suffers in diabetic patients, which makes it difficult to design effective treatment strategies,” says Dr Tran.
What is known is that the capacity of the mitochondria to supply energy to the cells of the heart is reduced in diabetes. This means the diabetic heart is not receiving the same level of energy as a healthy heart, which in turn affects the diabetic heart’s capacity to pump blood.
Dr Tran has designed a series of experiments that allows for the measurement of mitochondrial function, contractile function and contractile protein composition from a small piece of human heart tissue from diabetic and non-diabetic patients.
The data from these tissues will be used to develop computational models of cardiac mechano-energetic function specific to each patient.
“As an emerging researcher, this grant is my first successful national project grant so it’s nice to see recognition for my research programme,” he says.
“This will help to fill a gap in our understanding of the mechanisms underlying diabetic heart disease which is an important step for developing therapeutic outcomes.”
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