New Delhi: Another feather in India’s healthcare research cap.
Country’s first biobank for heart failures research inaugurated at Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology recently. The first National Heart Failure Biobank (NHFB) in the country will collect blood, biopsies, and clinical data as a guide to future therapies.
Dr. V. K. Saraswat, President of SCTIMST and Member, NITI Aayog, in his message, hoped that the NHFB would prove very helpful in understanding molecular pathways and would improve the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of Heart Failure. “It will open a new era in research in Heart Failure in India and will change the persona of diagnosis and treatment of heart failure patients,” he said.
“There are no heart failure biobanks in the country, and this would greatly help in guiding future therapies and technologies and would benefit the heart failure patients significantly,” said Prof. Balram Bhargava, Secretary, Department of Health Research (DHR) and DG, Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) while inaugurating the NHFB virtually on 5th August.
The Biobank at SCTIMST has already signed an MOU with InStem Bangalore for collaborative research in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which runs in families with thickening heart muscles.
With heart failure emerging as a major health problem in India, ICMR had initiated the National Centre for Advanced Research and Excellence in Heart Failure (CARE-HF) at SCTIMST for scaling up research in the field. The Heart Failure Biobank is one of the major components of the project, with a fund allocation of 85 Lakhs for developing state-of-the-art storage facilities.
“The facility will be useful for the research and treatment of post-covid heart failure. The increase in the observed prevalence of long-COVID symptoms and post-COVID heart failure calls for long-COVID clinics to collect patient data and biospecimens that can be biobank for future research. Through the NHFB, researchers can get access to well-annotated biological specimens linked to clinical data while maintaining appropriate standards of quality and security. I sincerely hope that the NHFB will facilitate research both in India and abroad, helping clinicians and scientists to work together to understand and find solutions to heart failure-related morbidity and mortality. ” Prof. Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary, Department of Science & Technology (DST) pointed out in his message.
