Heart failure is a condition where the heart doesn’t pump blood well or does so at the expense of elevated filling pressures.
The major need in heart failure today is for a form of heart failure where the heart becomes stiffer with age, accelerated by being overweight, obese, having high blood pressure, and being pre-diabetic or diabetic. This “stiff” form of heart failure is now the most common form of heart failure in the world. Shockingly, there are almost no therapies for this type of heart failure.
To meet this unmet need, Professor Paul Bannon has designed an innovative research project where a piece of tissue is taken from the heart of these patients at the time of cardiac surgery. Professor John O’Sullivan recently discovered that replenishing a molecule called NAD can completely reverse this type of heart failure in model systems. Now, Professors Bannon and O Sullivan along with Professor Sean Lal, are undertaking the world’s first clinical trial, called CardioNAD, of NAD repletion in this type of heart failure.
In a world-first, some heart tissue is taken from patients who are on the NAD medication to demonstrate how feasible replenishing NAD is using the precursor molecule.
This is an enormous undertaking, addressing a major unmet need.
We have recently published some initial work examining the molecular changes in the tissue of these patients using the same NAD precursors, illustrated below. Now, we will undertake CardioNAD to demonstrate how this approach will work using an oral NAD precursor in heart failure patients.
