Source: CHU Nancy - Friday 22 February 2013.
HOMAGE (Heart OMics in AGEing), conducted by 19 international teams (for France, 5 cities involved), aims to prevent the development of heart failure in elderly people with a high cardiovascular risk and to individualise their treatment. Supported by the European Union to the tune of €12M for 6 years, Prof. Faïez Zannad, coordinator of the Inserm 9501 Pierre Drouin Clinical Investigation Centre at the Nancy University Hospital and researcher at the Inserm U1116 unit, is in charge of the entire project coordinated by Inserm. 30,000 volunteers in 10 countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States) are participating through existing cohorts and biological collections pooled for the project.
HOMAGE aims to isolate markers that are more specific and sensitive than those used so far, to enable screening at
This is personalised medicine, which involves the early and targeted detection of the disease in patients at risk in order to set up treatments adapted to each individual. The approach used by researchers, known as " omics ", is innovative: it involves analysing a very large number of variables simultaneously. It r
is based on the validation of promising and reliable biomarker candidates identified by multiple cross-referenced approaches on very large amounts of data
(genomic, proteomic, transcriptomic and metabolomic). Ultimately, the aim is to develop screening tests for health professionals worldwide.
HOMAGE is fully in line with the research strategy undertaken by the Nancy University Hospital and the University of Lorraine, through the Lorraine hospital-university programme " Normal and pathological ageing ". It relies on the experimental research laboratories and the research units
he clinic on the Nancy university hospital site, already working on preventive health issues, particularly in the cardiovascular (heart failure, hypertension) and osteoarticular (osteoarthritis) fields, environmental or nutritional diseases such as diabetes, but also
in oncology or neurology.
Heart failure is aserious disease affecting the capacity of the heart muscle and affects more than 6.5 million people in Europe. Its incidence is increasing in industrialised countries due to the ageing of the population and the explosion in the number of people with heart failure.
Cardiovascular risk factors in general: diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure. It is one of the major causes of death and disability.
It is the most common cause of hospitalisation in patients over 65 years of age. The socio-economic cost of its management is estimated at nearly €1.5 billion per year in France.
More about HOMAGE: www.homage-hf.eu
