Justin Lui, MD, MS, Receives Awards from the National Scleroderma Foundation, American Heart Association

Justin Lui, MD, MS, assistant professor of medicine, has received the Walter and Marie Coyle Award from the National Scleroderma Foundation. This three-year, $200,000 grant award will fund his study “Cardiac Strain Phenotyping of Systemic Sclerosis-related Pulmonary Hypertension.”

Concurrently, Lui has also received $231,000 from the American Heart Association’s American Heart Association Career Development Award to support his study “Role of Left Ventricular Strain Patterns in Systemic Sclerosis-related Pulmonary Hypertension.”

Lui, who also is a pulmonary and critical care physician at Boston Medical Center, conducts clinical and translational research at the intersection of medicine and engineering. He applies advanced data science approaches to study pulmonary hypertension in a rare disease known as systemic sclerosis that leads to scarring in the skin, heart, lungs and blood vessels.

Pulmonary hypertension caused by high pressure in the blood vessels that connect the heart and lungs affects about one in 10 patients with systemic sclerosis. Over half of these patients affected by pulmonary hypertension die within 3 years from the time of diagnosis.

Many patients with pulmonary hypertension may also have signs of heart disease from systemic sclerosis, which may explain why these patients do so poorly.

In his National Scleroderma Foundation project, Lui will study how global changes in the way the heart contracts and relaxes are related to increased scarring in the heart through biomarkers measured in the blood. As part of his American Heart Association award, Lui will further investigate how these regional patterns of abnormal heart contraction may be related to the poor outcomes seen in these patients.

“We will first look at how the regional patterns may be different in those with and without pulmonary hypertension. We will then look at how these regional pattern changes in time. Lastly, we will examine whether these patterns of abnormal contraction affect outcomes in patients with this condition,” explains Lui. Data from this study could provide further insight on the science of this disease.