Renewal Awards and Collaborations
Collaborations
Through the Go Red SFRN, the five centers aimed to identify risks, signal markers and underlying conditions that may influence one another in previously unrealized ways. They accomplished this by communicating and collaborating to form a more synergistic picture of how different aspects of cardiovascular health in women can be related.
“The AHA very cleverly designed these networks to have, really, a snowball effect. The emphasis on collaboration between centers has resulted in us going and getting funding for directions that we probably wouldn’t have anticipated if left to our own devices — and that’s been a beautiful thing to see,” said Carl Hubel, Ph.D., Center Director at Magee Womens Research Institute. The research has “launched” fellows “who are now doing groundbreaking work,” he said.
“That’s been really exciting. To learn from other groups — for example experts in heart failure or biochemical pathways — it was really a nobrainer for us to collaborate with them,” added Hubel, whose team co-published with the Center at Johns Hopkins University.
Columbia fellow Faris Zuraikat, who spent time at University of California, San Diego — where research into sedentary lifestyle and nutrition coincided nicely with his studies into women’s sleep and behaviors — said he felt the collaboration was critical.
“We all have different expertise within the centers and certainly, across centers, collaboration allows us to develop relationships and learn from investigators who have similar interests but either a slightly or vastly different expertise than we do,” he said.
The OAC Chairperson, Kristin Newby, M.D., said the Go Red SFRN was “uniquely set up to foster cross-institutional collaboration within the network and the opportunity to share and apply tools to another Center’s project.
“Having the investigators working in a network and with an emphasis on collaboration really fostered the team science and strengthened all the individual projects.”
GRFW is One of 12 AHA Strategic Networks
The Go Red for Women SFRN is one of 12 multi-center, multi-disciplinary research efforts created since the AHA established its first SFRN in 2014.
Other targeted topics include Prevention, Hypertension, Disparities, Heart Failure, Obesity, Children, Vascular Disease, Atrial Fibrillation, Arrhythmias & Sudden Cardiac Death, Cardiometabolic Health with a focus on Type 2 Diabetes, Health Technologies and Innovation and Disparities in Cardio-Oncology.
Renewal Awards
The comprehensive research and diverse findings from the Go Red SFRN are already being furthered - through ongoing work and new projects from fellows and through renewal awards.
The original SFRN funding at NYU primarily focused on studying why women suffer heart attacks despite unclogged arteries, but the preliminary findings and ongoing research can contribute to preventing and treating heart attacks in all people, she said.
"We will never really understand why this type of heart attack is more common in women until we compare the findings in women and men. Doing studies only in women is a really important first step, but if we don't compare it to men, it's incomplete," Reynolds said.
"We'll have started by learning whether there are differences in platelet activity or genetics within women who have different types of heart attack. Then we really need to understand how that relates to men with different types of heart attack - because maybe that will give us insight not only into why women are more likely to have heart attack with open arteries, but why men are more likely to have heart attacks at younger ages and overall," Reynolds said.
"Maybe there's something we can learn that's really a fundamental form of prevention."