Off Road 2022
Empowering the heart to terminate its own rhythm disorders
The grant:
The aim of this program is to challenge young (bio)medical and/or health researchers to realize new insights and unexpected breakthroughs in medical and/or health research. The focus is on developing an innovative idea into a proof-of-concept. This means that, although the idea or concept has a long-term character, the project focuses on testing the hypothesis underlying the concept/idea. We expect that a few of these experimental studies will result in groundbreaking discoveries, and we also accept that this will not be the case for some Off Road projects (High Risk- High Gain projects).
Proposals within this program have a high-risk profile and do not fall within established lines of research. Project proposals describe an unconventional research direction that is still in a start-up phase. The assessment will focus on the idea and not so much on the researcher’s CV. The emphasis is on elaborating the idea, and it is possible that this results in a negative outcome. The submission criteria are also less detailed than usual. This concerns a relatively small grant for a short period of time.
Background
A little more than a year ago, I came upon the idea that contrary to popular belief our heart might already be able to cure itself. This idea came due to the fact that in the Laboratory of Experimental Cardiology at the LUMC it was often observed that in order to test arrhythmia termination strategies, it is extremely difficult to create those arrhythmias because most of them terminate spontaneously. I now wanted to unravel the underlying mechanisms of such spontaneous arrhythmia termination in a realistic computer model of atrial fibrillation and then reinforce these mechanisms, so that arrhythmias would more often stop by themselves.
Since this is not the traditional way of thinking within cardiology, the Off Road grant formed the ideal platform to try this idea with. After undergoing a first selection and subsequently an interview round, I was informed that my proposal got selected to be honored. This news was also published in a short article on their website (in Dutch). A piece of the 'good news message' can be found underneath (also in Dutch).
After having traveled for 1 month in between my previous contract and this grant, I officially started working on this project on the 1st of December 2022. I am very happy to have been given this opportunity and plan to make the most of it!
Impact
This grant will allow me to study the aforementioned idea for approximately 1,5 year. In that time I hope to accomplish a link between the in vitro experiments in our lab and a computer model of the exact same set-up. With the computer model, I then hope to find a mechanism or at the bare minimum some contributing factors to spontaneous rhythm termination. The results will hopefully have a positive impact on the further development of my scientific career.