PRESIDENT'S EARLY CAREER AWARD 2010

The Circulation Foundation is delighted to announce Matthew Bown as the winner of the 2010 President's Early Career Award.

This new award is designed to support outstanding young clinician-researchers.

Matthew, a Senior Lecturer in Vascular Surgery at Leicester University, will recieve £100,000 over a 2 year period.

Matthew's research is focused on the genetics of abdominal aortic aneurysms and their growth.

The condition remains a significant cause of death in the UK and accounts for a substantial proportion of healthcare expenditure since the only treatment for the condition is major surgery.

There is usually a long drawn-out period between diagnosis and the end-stages of the disease process when surgery is required.  This time affords an opportunity for pharmacotherapeutic intervention to reduce or abolish aneurysm growth; however, no such treatment exists.

To date, the majority of AAA research has focused on the end-stages of the disease and little is known about the natural history of aneurysm growth or the biological/pathological factors associated with growth.  This is largely due to the lack of adequately sized long-term studies of patients with small aneurysms and the limitations of pre-genomic research.

Matthew's research addresses both of these points in a direct, large-scale and comprehensive manner.  The project is a prospective cohort study of patients with small abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA) and a group of healthy controls.

Ten-thousand males with AAA and ten-thousand healthy controls attending the NHS AAA screening programme will be recruited over 5 years.

Biochemical samples will be obtained from each participant and all participants will be followed up through the UK Medical Research Information Service. Those participants with small AAA will be followed up with yearly biochemical sampling and clinical data collection.

This approach will generate an unprecedented resource to enable the study of the natural history of AAA alongside genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic experiments that will determine biological markers and pathways associated with AAA and AAA growth.

We wish Matthew all the best with his research in helping to stamp out vascular disease.