A Matter of the Heart: German-Chinese Collaboration According to the Federal Statistical Office of Germany, cardiovascular diseases were the cause of more than one third of deaths in the country in 2020. One of these life-threatening cardiovascular diseases is chronic heart failure. If the disease remains untreated, it can progress further and damage the heart as well as other organs such as the lung in the long term. Since January 2020, the project »ChInValue – NRW–China Cooperations: Optimisation of GRK5 Inhibitors for the Therapy of Heart Failure and Heart Hypertrophy« is pursuing a new approach for the drug therapy of chronic heart failure and the abnormal enlargement of the heart’s muscle cells that often goes along with it. Chronic heart failure can have various causes, for example high blood pressure or a heart attack. In most cases, heart failure is only detected and treated when patients already display symptoms such as a reduced performance, shortness of breath and breast pain. G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) play an important role in the physiological heart function. They are located in the cell membrane and transmit signals to the inside of the cell, for example to regulate the strength and rate of the heartbeat. In cardiovascular diseases, GPCRs are often chronically stimulated. As a result, certain enzymes, the so-called G-protein-coupled receptor kinases (GRK), desensitise the receptors. “In the long run, the overstimulation can lead to a reduced heart function and ultimately to heart failure. That is why we want to develop an agent that specifically inhibits the key enzyme that is upregulated in heart failure: GRK5,” says Miriam Kleindl, PhD student in the research group CardiovascuMiriam Kleindl, a PhD student in the Cardiovascular Pharmacology research group, analysing the activation and quantity of proteins of the in vivo GRK study in order to find out how the signalling pathways are regulated.
Disease mechanisms & Targets
lar Pharmacology at ISAS.
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