Cardiovascular disease is a main cause of death in Europe (WHO factsheet Nº310, updated May 2017). An estimated 17.9 million people died from CVDs in 2016, representing 31% of all global deaths. During adulthood, coronary artery diseases cause myocardial infarction ultimately causing heart failure and being the leading cause of death worldwide. Congenital heart defects (CHD) are found in over 20% of perinatal deaths and severe CHD is found in approximately 3.0 per 1,000 live born children. Thus, there is need for research for better early disease diagnosis and the development of therapeutic strategies. In vivo imaging and the possibility to evaluate cellular behaviour in a developing, regenerating, living and beating heart is an invaluable tool to investigate the biological principles governing the cardiovascular system and those that impact cardiovascular health.
This EID training network strengthens on-going European academia-industry partnerships and provided innovative training to Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) at the intersection of the fields of biology, microscopy, optics and bio-computing. Through this consortium, we have been able to improve our knowledge on how a heart is formed and is able to regenerate upon injury.
The central focus of 4DHeart was to train experts on cardiovascular research through the use of live imaging. Light sheet Microscopy, high-throughput fluorescent light microscopy platforms, as well as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) were used in combination with newly developed image processing and image quantification pipelines to decipher how a vertebrate heart is formed at the cellular level and monitor alterations of cardiac function with high accuracy. The supervisors of the training program were academic (CNIC, UBERN, IGBMC, CNRS) and industrial (Leica, BITPLANE; ACQUIFER/Ditabis) partners, experts on cardiovascular development, physics, bio-computing, optics, image analysis, screening platforms and big data handling.
