Björn Redfors wants to improve the care of a myocardial infarction
Björn Redfors wants to understand what happens in the heart during a myocardial infarction. He combines basic, clinical and registry-based research, with the aim of contributing to better treatment. Meet this year's recipients of the Minor Fernström Prize.
Björn Redfors is Professor of Cardiovascular Research at the University of Gothenburg and Consultant Cardiologist at Sahlgrenska University Hospital. We meet at the Wallenberg Laboratory, where he conducts some of his research. Here he continues to work closely with his former supervisor Elmir Omerovic, including studies on Björn's dissertation topic takotsubo, sometimes also called broken heart syndrome.
Björn Redfors thinks that researchers should be encouraged to develop further collaborations with their former supervisors after their dissertation:
“Demonstrating independence as a researcher has become very important, but it limits opportunities for local collaboration. I think it would increase the quality of research, allow for larger and more meaningful research projects and attract more young researchers if we put more emphasis on profiling ourselves collectively within our research areas, instead of highlighting our individual laboratories and individual researchers.”
Myocardial cells shut down
Björn received his PhD in 2014 with a thesis on animal models for the study of takotsubo, a syndrome where severe stress causes a type of myocardial infarction.
In takotsubo, a large part of the heart muscle becomes stunned, a phenomenon that cardiologists call myocardial stunning. Even in patients with a normal myocardial infarctions, heart muscle cells are knocked out. In takotsubo, virtually all cells recover fairly quickly and the heart is essentially restored, but in myocardial infarction, cells die. It is not entirely evident how many of the affected cells die or only become stunned during a myocardial infarction.
Protecting the organism
Björn Redfors’ group wants to find out why and how the heart muscle cells shut down. There are different theories, but Björn's group is working on the hypothesis that it basically is about protecting the cell. They believe that myocardial cells temporarily switch off their pumping activity when threatened by lack of oxygen, to increase the availability of oxygen and energy for other cellular processes that are more important for the survival of the cell and the (human) organism.
“There is usually some excess capacity in the heart. If only some of the myocardial cells shut down in an orderly fashion, the heart is still able to maintain its pumping capacity,” explains Björn, adding
“Understanding the mechanisms of myocardial stunning would allow us to develop better targeted treatments.”
International collaborations
After Björn received his PhD, he spent two years as a postdoc in New York, a stay that led to several successful research collaborations in the US. Currently, Björn is involved in two international clinical studies, comparing in different ways the established treatments for coronary artery stenosis, balloon angioplasty and coronary artery surgery.
Clinical research is time-consuming, both in terms of study administration tasks and patient enrollment. The studies Björn is conducting at Sahlgrenska would not be possible without dedicated and skilled employees.
“We have several talented people in my group who, among other things, take care of updating protocols and ethical review applications. We could not run our research projects without them,” says Björn, who notes that research also depends on good clinicians who take the time to include patients in studies:
“The patient encounter is very important and often time-consuming, and not all patients with myocardial infarctions are willing to participate in studies, especially in the randomized trials where randomization determines which treatment they receive,” says Björn Redfors.
The research in the group has a broad approach, from studies of mechanisms at the cellular level to clinical randomized studies and on to registry-based research at the population level:
“We want to move between clinical observations, experimental testing, population-level correlations and detailed studies in clinical cohorts.”
The official name of the prize is "Eric K. Fernström's Prize for Young, Particularly Promising, and Successful Researchers," but it is most often simply called the Minor Fernström Prize. It is a personal prize of SEK 100,000 from the Eric K. Fernström Foundation, awarded annually to a researcher at each medical faculty in Sweden.
