Boston facility will provide testing ground for researchers to collaborate on “early warning system” for coronary heart disease
October 20, 2017 — The American Heart Association, Verily and AstraZeneca announced the opening of the One Brave Idea Science Innovation Center in Boston. The Center will be home to the Cardiovascular Medicine Innovation team, led by Calum MacRae, M.D., Ph.D., chief of cardiovascular medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) who, leveraging the latest technologies and scientific advances, will continue their work for One Brave Idea, the $75 million research enterprise charged with bringing an end to coronary heart disease and its consequences.
The Science Innovation Center will provide an environment where world-renowned investigators can work quickly and collaboratively to discover new ways to identify the earliest markers of heart disease and develop strategies to stop the disease before an emergency happens. At the Innovation Center, they will have access to hospitals and clinics for real-world implementation, the engineering expertise of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the clinical device expertise of BWH’s Next Generation Phenotyping Center, and the tech and medical innovation ecosystem in Cambridge and Boston.
The One Brave Idea team represents a wide variety of specialties, including engineering and data science, and hails from institutions including BWH, MIT and Stanford. They are working to create a coronary heart disease “early warning system” by examining what happens 10-20 years before risk factors typically appear.
“Facilitating collaboration among scientists is a cornerstone strategy for the American Heart Association and this team of multidisciplinary scientists aims to understand the earliest stages of the disease, figure out how it develops to prevent it from ever leading to heart attack and stroke,” said Nancy Brown, chief executive officer of the American Heart Association. “Through Verily’s informatic capabilities, AstraZeneca’s proprietary data and our evolving ecosystem of patient-centered research and scientific networks, the One Brave Idea research team will translate their findings into new prevention and treatment strategies.”
“I’m immensely proud to lead this diverse team of investigators, who are committed to exploring and identifying the potential opportunities to prevent the development of heart disease. Creating multidisciplinary research teams to attack a problem from many angles is a model that we believe will ultimately have a significant impact on cardiovascular health,” said MacRae.
For more information: www.onebraveidea.com