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Additional Ventures: Investing in Congenital Heart Disease Research to Advance Care

Additional Ventures: Investing in Congenital Heart Disease Research to Advance Care 150 150 Katie Brind'Amour, PhD, MS, CHES

Additional Ventures is a purpose-driven nonprofit that has developed the Single Ventricle Research Fund (SVRF), an annual research award program dedicated to accelerating research and improving care for people with single ventricle heart defects. The fund supports investigators through multi-year, high-impact grants focused on different elements in their carefully structured research roadmap.

By funding investigators focused on key areas of the development and amelioration of single ventricle congenital heart disease (SF CHD), Additional Ventures aims to make single ventricle defects better understood and more treatable.

Graphic with the following text: DRIVING SINGLE VENTRICLE CHD ADVANCEMENTS FROM EVERY ANGLE Foundational clinical and research resources Firm understanding of SV disease origins and risk factors Defined biological mechanisms of outcomes Predictable, preventable or treatable clinical sequelae Introduction of curative solutions

In 2020, Nationwide Children’s received a $1 million Innovation Fund endowed by Additional Ventures, joining a handful of other research institutions in a large-scale coordinated effort to find new ways to functionally cure patients with SV CHD.

Nationwide Children’s awarded portions of the Additional Ventures funding to three projects:

  • Elucidating Mechanisms of Ventricular Hypoplasia in PA-IVS Using Patient-Derived iPSCs
    • Co-principal investigators Vidu Garg, MD, PhD, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Research at The Heart Center, and Mingtao Zhao, DVM, PhD, principal investigator in the Center for Cardiovascular Research
  • Development of a Protocol to Risk Stratify Individuals With Single Ventricle Congenital Heart Disease Using Deep Phenotyping and Genome Sequencing
    • Co-principal investigators Kim McBride, MD, MS, division chief of Genetic and Genomic Medicine, and Peter White, PhD, senior director of Computational Genomics
  • Unlocking Our Regenerative Capacity: Elucidating the Role of LYST on Neotissue Formation in Tissue Engineered Constructs
    • Co-principal investigators Christopher Breuer, MD, director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine, and Rick Wilson, PhD, executive director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine

More information on Additional Ventures and their funded SV CHD studies can be found at AdditionalVentures.org.

This article appears in the Fall/Winter 2021 print issue. Download the full issue.

Image credits: Nationwide Children’s

To learn more about CHD research at Nationwide Children’s, read How Patient-Derived Stem Cells are Changing the Trajectory of Congenital Heart Disease Research.

About the author

Katherine (Katie) Brind’Amour is a freelance medical and health science writer based in Pennsylvania. She has written about nearly every therapeutic area for patients, doctors and the general public. Dr. Brind’Amour specializes in health literacy and patient education. She completed her BS and MS degrees in Biology at Arizona State University and her PhD in Health Services Management and Policy at The Ohio State University. She is a Certified Health Education Specialist and is interested in health promotion via health programs and the communication of medical information.

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