Personalised DCM care

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Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) is a condition that causes the heart muscle to become thin and stretched, making it harder to pump blood around the rest of the body. This leads to tiredness and breathlessness and can progress into heart failure. It currently affects 1 in 250 people in the UK and is the leading cause of heart transplantation.

Some patients with DCM respond well to treatment, while others don’t, and currently doctors can’t predict which patients will recover and which ones won’t. This makes treating the condition difficult, as patients may receive treatments that are too weak or too strong, leading to serious side effects, increased healthcare costs, and poorer outcomes for patients.

This research project, run by Professor Sanjay Prasad, Dr Michela Noseda, and Dr Lukas Mach at Imperial College London is aiming to develop a test that will improve understanding of why some DCM patients respond better to medication than others. To develop this, the team will first collect samples of heart tissue from newly diagnosed patients with DCM. These samples will be analysed using two cutting-edge techniques: single-nucleus RNA sequencing – which will show what each type of heart cell is doing, and spatial transcriptomics – which will show where certain genes are active. This combined approach will allow them to compare the gene activity between patients who get better and those who don’t and compare them to healthy tissue.

It is hoped that this research will provide doctors with the understanding of which genes in DCM patients correspond with positive responses to treatment, allowing them to incorporate it into decision-making about treatment and care pathways. This will help patients receive the right treatments sooner, avoid unnecessary procedures and medication side effects, and improve their quality of life.