Framingham Heart Study Summit Showcases Vast Data and New Research Opportunities
The Framingham Heart Study (FHS) is considered one of the most influential and important epidemiological studies in the world. From its beginnings in 1948 with the passage of the National Heart Act, the study has tracked 15,447 participants across multiple generations, collected two million biological samples, and revolutionized the way we view and treat heart disease, from an inevitable consequence of aging to a preventable and manageable condition.
Boston University has been the academic partner and contractor managing the study since 1971.
“The Framingham Heart Study has literally saved millions of lives over the last 78 years,” Donald Lloyd-Jones, MD, director of the Framingham Center for Population and Prevention Science, which houses and manages the FHS, told the audience at the study’s October 7 Summit on Recent Scientific Findings.
Donald M. Lloyd-Jones, MD, ScM, director of the Framingham Center for Population and Prevention Science, talks with (L to R) Lindsay A. Farrer, PhD, Jessica L. Fetterman, PhD and Daniel Levy, MD, prior to the start of the FHS Summit on Recent Scientific Findings.
Part of the FHS mission and mandate is that its data be available to affiliated and qualified non-affiliated investigators. Held virtually and in Hiebert Lounge, the summit featured presentations by 15 researchers discussing their work and the potential for new studies.
“A lot of our efforts now are focused on healthy aging and brain health, but we also have studies looking at kidneys, lungs, liver, bone; you name it, we’ve studied it,” said Lloyd-Jones.
With 6,300 living participants faithfully returning to Framingham every two to five years for examinations, as well as enrolling in new, ancillary studies, FHS continues to amass data that is increasingly diverse and sophisticated.
“I want you to get a sense of the richness and the comprehensiveness of the (FHS) data specific to the brain and be thinking about how that could enable research for you in the future,” said Rhoda Au, PhD, MBA, professor of anatomy & neurobiology and one of the co-principal investigators for the FHS Brain Aging Program. Now the largest FHS ancillary study, it received a five-year, $31.5M grant renewal this summer from the National Institute on Aging.
“Everybody talks about precision medicine, and I think the Framingham Heart Study is uniquely positioned to address this from the standpoint of Alzheimer’s disease (AD),” said Au. She said they have identified more than 34,000 plasma samples collected and stored from 1988 until now that are of sufficient quality and quantity to be profiled for AD biomarkers.
“It’s a treasure trove of opportunity for new science,” she said.
Au said new funding for the brain aging study will support technology that can detect ultra-low-abundance disease biomarkers that are normally difficult and costly to measure, like p-tau217, a protein indicative of brain nerve cell damage caused by AD.
Brain aging researchers also are investigating a blood-based biomarker that specifically measures tau protein tangles that damage nerve cells in Alzheimer’s disease.
Rhoda Au, PhD, MBA, asks a question during a presentation.
“Those are the two major pathologies of AD, and that’s what starts to move us into precision medicine,” said Au.
Andrew Johnson, PhD, senior investigator and head of biomedical informatics at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), the study’s primary federal funder and sponsor, holds similar positions at FHS. He has spent the past two decades in Framingham using FHS data to investigate blood platelets and cardiovascular disease risk. Johnson used an Olympics metaphor to compare the quality and quantity of FHS cardiovascular data to other studies.
“From an Olympic standpoint, Framingham basically has the gold medal and that’s allowed us to ask new questions, but also to revisit some really old hypotheses in the literature,” Johnson told the summit audience.
Deepa Gopal, MD, MS, assistant professor of medicine and staff cardiologist at Boston Medical Center, is an FHS co-principal investigator with Jessica Fetterman, PhD, associate professor of medicine, leading one of the newest ancillary studies focusing on creating an organ and tissue bank for cardiovascular research similar to those for brain banks for the study of neurodegenerative diseases.
“Tissue is a big component of understanding disease,” said Gopal. “With the exception of the brain in FHS, we’ve been limited to circulating cells and plasma.”
Gopal cited the big gains made in cancer research through examination of organs and tissue. She and Fetterman are contacting FHS participants to inquire about donating their heart postmortem for dissection, analysis, storage and a comparison to the lifelong data already collected by the heart study.
“With this tissue biobank we’re trying to create a scientific resource available to the greater scientific community both within and outside of Framingham to facilitate deep interrogation of the human cardiovascular tissue,” said Gopal.
“What we really hope is that this (research summit) will stimulate new opportunities for investigators to get together, ask new scientific questions, and leverage the amazing data that represent the Framingham Heart Study,” said Lloyd-Jones.