Congestive heart failure is a major health problem that afflicts close to 1.5% of the population of the US and Canada. Patients with congestive heart failure have significantly reduced survival and quality of life. Multiple new strategies for the treatment of congestive heart failure are being developed, many of them involving complex strategies, including some that hope to regenerate the heart. Progress in transforming these treatment strategies from ideas to clinical practice is hampered by a lack of a network of sophisticated clinical researchers possessing the infrastructure required to test these complex strategies. The NIH has decided to form a Heart Failure Research Network of to address this challenge. The Canadian East-West Network is proposing to join the NIH Network to help it attain its goals of bringing innovative experimental strategies for the treatment of heart failure from the laboratory to the bedside. The Canadian East-West Network is made up of 19 university hospital centers, 7 large regional hospital centers, and 18 regional hospital centers. Together they treat over 10,000 patients with heart failure, of which around 25% are new patients a year. Their university hospital centers have the sole tertiary responsibility for 13.5 million people, and share in the tertiary care responsibility of another 10 million people. All major hospitals caring for the 8 million people in the province of Quebec take part in the Network. The Canadian East-West Network has a number of special attributes, and brings with it expertise that would be helpful to the NIH network as a whole. Its members belong to a single payer socialized medical system, which facilitates patient follow-up and data generation. It has a long and successful tradition of working with the NIH, it has an experienced clinical research coordinating center, and some of its members have worked successfully as a network for nearly twenty years. The Canadian East-West Network brings with it a web-based electronic patient record that it has developed and is willing to share, a cutting edge pharmacogenomics center, expertise in blood sampling, transportation and measurement, and two implantable artificial heart programs. The Canadian East-West Network proposes a project using pharmacogenomics to identify which patients are most and least likely to benefit from a given medication, and a second project that will compare the ability of two types of a patients own stem cells in regenerating their heart after a large myocardial infarction (heart attack).
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