International work on high blood pressure

10 December 2003

A groundbreaking international collaboration is quietly underway this week in the Samuels building here at UNSW.

Personal contact at professional meetings, and a common interest in issues of high blood pressure, led to the collaboration between Associate Professor Albert Avolio of the graduate school of biomedical engineering and two prominent British scientists.

Professor John Cockcroft, professor of cardiology at the University of Wales College of Medicine, Cardiff (UWCM) and Dr Ian Wilkinson from the Clinical Pharmacology Unit, Addenbrooke's Hospital, University of Cambridge, first came to Australia in 2000 to investigate the possibilities of a research partnership with Professor Avolio's Arterial Function Group.

The research questions to be answered in this collaboration concern high blood pressure resulting from stiffness of the arteries, which is a significant risk factor for cardiovascular disease in older people. By blocking the production of agents such as nitric oxide (NO) and stimulating its release in the arterial lining, their influence on arterial muscle tone can be measured.

"We wanted to collaborate with Albert as he is very highly regarded internationally in the field of arterial haemodynamics," Dr Wilkinson, a clinical pharmacologist, said this week. "The next phase of this work is now designed to answer questions raised by the earlier work we did together."

Several international trips later, the first papers from that work have now been published, most recently in the prestigious Journal of the American College of Cardiology. A further paper is expected to be published next year.

The groups now share the cost of a doctoral student, as part of an ARC Linkage grant with GlaxoSmithKline. The student is presently working at AFG but will later work at the lab in Cambridge, where the initial work at UNSW on sheep will be translated into further patient-based research. In particular, the work at Cambridge will look at a range of therapeutic drugs given orally to increase NO in the arterial muscle wall.

The Arterial Function Group is part of the graduate school of biomedical engineering, an interdisciplinary unit which coordinates biomedical engineering studies and research being conducted by various schools and departments within the University and its teaching hospitals. Biomedical engineering is the application of engineering techniques and analysis to problem solving in medicine and the biological sciences.