India News | First National Heart Failure Biobank in India Inaugurated at SCTIMST
Get latest articles and stories on India at LatestLY. The first National Heart Failure Biobank in India that would collect blood, biopsy samples, and clinical data and guide future therapies to benefit patients of heart failure significantly was inaugurated at the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology, the Department of Science and Technology said on Friday.
New Delhi, Aug 6 (PTI) The first National Heart Failure Biobank in India that would collect blood, biopsy samples, and clinical data and guide future therapies to benefit patients of heart failure significantly was inaugurated at the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology, the Department of Science and Technology said on Friday.
The facility will be useful for the research and treatment of post-Covid heart failure, it said.
Also Read | Rajasthan Youth Dies After Bluetooth Earphone Device Explodes in His Ear During Phone Call.
Principal investigator of the project and professor of cardiology at SCTIMST, Dr. Harikrishnan S, said the storage facilities include minus 20 to minus 80-degrees mechanical freezers and a liquid nitrogen storage system which can store bio-samples at minus 140 degrees perpetually for years.
Currently, there are facilities to store nearly 25,000 bio-samples.
Also Read | Assam, Meghalaya CMs Set Up Committees To Resolve 12 Border Disputes in Phased Manner Through Talks.
The bio-samples include the blood, serum, tissue samples obtained during open-heart surgery and peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) and genomic DNA collected from heart failure patients. The biobank activity is supervised by a Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) with a member from ICMR, it said.
The samples are collected after informed consent from patients who are willing to donate specimens.
The samples stored and catalogued will be linked to clinical data such as physiological measures, imaging data like ECG, Echocardiography MRI, and follow-up data. Researchers and clinicians interested in research related to heart failure can collaborate with SCTIMST once the proposal is approved by the TAC and Ethics Committee of SCTIMST.
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, it said.
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, it said.
The Heart Failure Biobank is one of the major components of the project, with a fund allocation of Rs 85 lakhs for developing state-of-the-art storage facilities.
"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 Balram Bhargava, Secretary, Department of Health Research (DHR) and DG, Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) while inaugurating the NHFB virtually on August 5.
He added that the biobank will provide insights into heart diseases and heart failure among Indian children and adults, which are very different from that seen in the west.
V K Saraswat, President of SCTIMST and Member, NITI Aayog, 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.
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 bio-specimens that can be biobank for future research, DST Secretary Ashutosh Sharma said.
"Through the NHFB, researchers can get access to well-annotated biological specimens linked to clinical data while maintaining appropriate standards of quality and security," Sharma said.
(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)