Professor David Newby
BHF John Wheatley Chair of Cardiology
Centre for Cardiovascular Science, University of Edinburgh
- A BHF Centre of Research Excellence
Professor Newby's research focuses on how
blood vessels and the heart react in health and disease,
particularly in heart attacks and heart failure.
Heart Attacks
Every six minutes someone dies of a heart attack in the UK. Heart attacks are caused
by disease in the coronary arteries triggering the formation of a
blood clot, which blocks blood supply to the heart muscle.
With our support, Professor Newby's team has investigated
how the body can dissolve blood clots and what factors determine
the triggers of, and recovery from, heart attacks.
He is particularly interested in how smoking and air pollution
from traffic can trigger heart attacks. This work is helping to
identify the factors causing heart disease and the approaches to
limit their harmful effects.
Heart Failure
When the heart is damaged, it fails to pump blood around the
body effectively. Hundreds of thousands of people in the
UK are living with heart failure. Many have a poor quality of
life, and the condition has a worse prognosis than that of
many cancers.
We've funded Professor Newby's team to explore a range of
approaches to understand the consequences of heart failure on the
body and help discover new approaches to its treatment. This has
included studying new hormone systems and treatments as well as
devices that help breathing problems caused by heart failure.
Future focus
Professor Newby intends to investigate new, better, ways of
assessing blood vessels and the heart with the latest state-of-the-art scanners. This will
make it easier to identify and monitor people with heart
disease.
The team is working towards the vital aim of developing stem
cell-based treatments to repair heart muscle damaged by heart
attack. Their particular focus is to use stem cells created from
patients' own skin cells, known as 'IPS' cells. Professor Newby is
one of the lead researchers who'll be working in the
Scottish Centre of Regenerative Medicine, which is
part-funded by our Mending Broken
Hearts Appeal
