Cancer research may be sucking up all the headlines lately, what with the White House launching its cancer moonshot and technology billionaires sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into a hot new field of immunotherapy. But heart disease still kills more people every year, both worldwide (7 million deaths per year) and in the US (614,000), and a study published this summer found that the rate of decline in deaths from the disease has stalled since 2011.
The American Heart Association, the Verily Life Sciences unit of Alphabet, and AstraZeneca think $75 million over five years to a single researcher might change that. The three announced on Wednesday that their “One Brave Idea” research award will go to Dr. Calum MacRae, chief of cardiovascular medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, to support what they called “his visionary approach to understanding and addressing coronary heart disease and its devastating consequences.”
