Researchers at ICCC, Hospital Clínic, IMIM and URV awarded 2017 Daniel Bravo grants
<p>The Daniel Bravo Foundation has awarded four grants for stays at the Karolinska Institute, Rangueil University Hospital in Toulouse, Montreal Heart Institute and Harvard TH Chan School</p>
Rosa Suades, Marco Hernández, Anna Garcia-Elias and Marta Guasch are the four Catalan researchers who have been awarded grants from the Daniel Bravo Andreu Private Foundation in 2017. Each grant comes with a €3,000 monthly stipend (plus expenses) for a short stay abroad, promoting collaboration projects or networks in cardiovascular biomedical research of excellence between Catalonia and other countries.
The grants awarded by the Foundation, which were four this year instead of the normal three, allow researchers to spend between 3 and 9 months at some of the most prestigious cardiovascular research centers in the world.
Dr. Rosa Suades of the Catalan Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences (ICCC) will join the Karolinska Institute (Sweden) to work on miRNA profiles with a high risk of cardiovascular disease in asymptomatic patients with cardiovascular risk factors. The results could help establish specific miRNA as new biomarkers, according to Dr. Suades.
PhD student Marco Hernández of Hospital Clinic, will join the TAVI program at Rangueil University Hospital in Toulouse, which is working to establish transcatheter aortic valve replacement as the standard therapy for severe aortic valve stenosis in high-risk populations. The team hopes to determine the factors associated with major complications and improve patient safety.
Anna Garcia-Elias of the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM) will do her stay at the Montreal Heart Institute to study cardiac mechanoreceptors as molecules involved in developing heart failure and atrial fibrillation, a condition that severely affects quality of life, above all among the elderly.
Dr. Marta Guasch of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) will go to the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health to study diet and lifestyle patterns that condition cardiovascular diseases and their relationship with metabolomics. The results will help gain new knowledge for preventing type-2 diabetes and be used in public health guidelines.