Calum MacRae, MD, PhD, chief of cardiovascular medicine at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, is the winner of a $75 million research grant to discover a way to cure coronary heart disease.
The 5 year grant called One Brave Idea is a joint project of the American Heart Association, Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences), and AstraZeneca, which was first announced at the 2016 AHA meeting.
His winning idea was to search for "previously unrecognized signals marking the transition from wellness to the earliest, yet still largely invisible stages of disease," according to a press release from the collaboration.
"The earliest indicators of coronary heart disease remain unknown, both on a genetic and molecular level," MacRae said in a prepared statement. "If we unearth and characterize novel markers in people genetically prone to heart disease or with early stages of the disease, we can potentially screen the broader population at a younger age to identify those same markers and discover preventative or pre-disease interventions that can break the cascade towards disease."
The organizers had billed the award as being open to outsiders. When the project was first announced, Andy Conrad, CEO of Verily, said: "Could be a teenager from Wisconsin who has the best idea."
However, in the end, the winner was a cardiovascular heavyweight with an idea similar to the one that took former Brigham and Women's cardiologist Jessica Mega, MD, MPH, to Verily as chief medical officer, initially to head up its ambitious Baseline Study looking to define health through algorithms.
MacRae's idea was selected out of more than 300 submitted during an unusually short, 1-month formal application period -- "designed to remove the barriers and the silos that plague traditional research projects, like lengthy and time consuming application processes," Amit Chitre, AHA executive vice president for corporate communications, had told MedPage Today at the time. The application period was planned to have ended Feb. 14.
The award also comes with technical resources from Verily, scientific and mentoring help from AstraZeneca, and guidance from leaders at each of the three funding organizations.