Despite significant advances in the past 50 years, cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains the leading cause of death in Australia and most of the developed world. Identification and management of risk factors has led to a significant decrease in the incidence of fatal and non-fatal CVD, however approximately 1 in 5 people who suffer a heart attack have no standard modifiable risk factors.

There is an urgent need to identify those at risk for coronary artery disease (CAD) before it reaches a life or death emergency.

The goal of this project is to employ innovative scientific methods to investigate how genes, proteins and immune cells interact to either contribute to or protect against the development of CVD.

Dr Brieger and his team will be using a new technology called “mass cytometry”, where they take blood samples from the 4000 patients who have been recruited into the BioBank. They spin down the blood to isolate the immune cells and run it through the mass cytometer, giving vast amounts of information about each individual immune cell. They then compare these cells taken from a range of patients, including those with no coronary artery disease (CAD), those who have plaque but haven’t had a heart attack, and those who are having a heart attack, to find out what the differences are. 

The goal of Dr Brieger’s research is to identify a clear immune mechanism or marker that becomes dysregulated and makes someone more likely develop plaque – or causes plaque to rupture – leading to coronary disease or heart attacks. And once they identify that, we’ll be able to see where it fits in the disease pathway and whether it acts as an early detection marker or even as a target for new therapies.