Project description
Better diagnosis and treatment of blood clots could be around the corner
Blood clotting (coagulation) is an important process that protects us against excess external or internal bleeding when a blood vessel is damaged. However, when blood clots are traversing the circulatory system, hypoxia of downstream cells and tissues can occur with deadly results. Venous thromboembolism (VTE), including deep vein thrombosis and its life-threatening complication, pulmonary embolism, is among the most frequent causes of death in developed countries. We still do not know what triggers it, but hypoxia is known to play a role in clot formation. The EU-funded PROVE project is studying proteins and protein markers in human cells and blood samples from healthy individuals and patients with VTE to determine the effects of hypoxia on coagulation and the initiation of VTE. Outcomes are expected to lead to better diagnosis and treatment of this killer disease.
Objective
Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is a common, deadly condition affecting more than 1 million europeans, with 500.000 related deaths in EU per year. Many risk factors are established, but it is not known what triggers a VTE event, which hampers development of predictive and therapeutic measures. Hypoxia is known to play a major role in thrombus formation, but via which mechanisms is unclear. PROVE will be conducted at the university of Tromsø, using state-of-the-art equipment in a world-class thrombosis center of excellence (TREC) to uncover how hypoxia contributes to thrombus formation, with an emphasis on immunology and extracellular vesicles (EVs). TREC is composed of three units, combining epidemiology, clinic, and laboratory research, to conduct interdisciplinary, cutting-edge, research. PROVE will add aspects on immunology and EVs to TREC, two fields with greatly increasing importance in thrombotic research.
PROVE will address three research objectives: (i) To unravel processes and pathways triggered by IH in intravascular cells (i.e. endothelial cells, monocytes and platelets); (ii) To define the characteristics and procoagulant activity of cell-specific EVs derived from intravascular cells activated by VTE-associated stimuli including IH, (iii) To comprehensively compare cell-specific EVs isolated from plasma of VTE patients and healthy subjects, towards future development of diagnostic tools and improved treatment regimens.
This will be achieved by substantial characterizations and functional test of human cells and blood samples from both healthy individuals, and VTE patients. This will result in powerful data sets from protein expression analysis, and RNA sequencing, but also functional experiments to define effects of hypoxia on coagulation, and initiation of thrombi.
The long term goal of PROVE is to improve diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, to reduce the substantial suffering and costs of VTE.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicineangiologyvascular diseases
- medical and health scienceshealth sciencespublic healthepidemiology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencescell biology
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicineimmunology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgeneticsRNA
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
9019 Tromso
Norway