An injectable cure for inherited heart muscle conditions that can kill young people in the prime of their lives could be available within a few years, after an international team of researchers, led by Oxford University’s Professor Hugh Watkins and Harvard University’s Professor Christine Seideman, were announced as the winners of the British Heart Foundation’s Big Beat Challenge.
The global award, at £30m, is one of the largest non-commercial grants ever given and presents a “once in a generation opportunity” to provide hope for families struck by these killer diseases.
The winning team, CureHeart, will seek to develop the first cures for inherited heart muscle diseases by pioneering revolutionary and ultra-precise gene therapy technologies that could edit or silence the faulty genes that cause these deadly conditions.
'The £30 million from the BHF’s Big Beat Challenge will give us the platform to turbo-charge our progress in finding a cure so the next generation of children diagnosed with genetic cardiomyopathies can live long, happy and productive lives,' said Professor Watkins, who is the British Heart Foundation Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at Oxford University Radcliffe Department of Medicine.