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Our medical scientists are doing their best to ensure we have healthy hearts.

Heart Foundation WA recently announced its 2012 fellowships of $530,000 and almost all of them went to UWA investigators.

One of these is Dr Helena Viola , who is working on preventing further damage to the heart following a heart attack. Dr Viola also won the Foundation’s Owen James Thomas Trust Fund Award. She is an exceptional researcher, who was awarded the UWA Robert Street Prize for the most outstanding thesis when she graduated with her PhD in 2010. She works under the supervision of Associate Professor Livia Hool in the Cardiovascular Electrophysiology Laboratory (School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology). Dr Viola is adding to her PhD research in which she investigated the mechanisms associated with the development of cardiac hypertrophy (enlarging of the heart) that occurs after a heart attack.

“If the heart gets too big, it can’t function within a normal and healthy range and it starts to fail,” she said. “The patient is at risk of another heart attack and, more seriously, cardiac arrest.

“I’m now investigating the efficacy of a novel drug in reducing the development of cardiac hypertrophy.”

Dr Viola said she was committed to pursuing the mechanisms involved in the development of cardiac disease.

“Cardiovascular disease, a term that describes all heart, stroke and blood vessel diseases, is one of Australia’s biggest health problems, claiming the lives of nearly 50,000 people a year. That’s about 34 per cent of all disease-related deaths,” she said.

“My ultimate aim is to bridge fundamental yet vital cellular-based research to applied therapeutic intervention and, as a result, to develop improved treatment strategies for cardiovascular disease.”

Other UWA medical researchers who received National Heart Foundation fellowships include Winthrop Professor Hugh Barrett , Dr Hayley Christian , Dr Kristjana Einarsdottir (who also won the Bendat Family Foundation Scholarship), Lee Nedkoff and Professor Bu Yeap .

Winthrop Professor Daniel Green and Assistant Professor Natalie Ward had their funding renewed.

Published in UWA News , 26 November 2012