As with most careers, researchers work for years to build through larger and more prestigious (and competitive) levels of funding. Newly minted PhDs do not, for example, typically receive multi-million-dollar funding for the ideas and questions they want to pursue in the laboratory. In fact, it can be quite challenging for “early-career” or “early-stage” investigators to get any funding for their research projects.

This is why the VCU Health Pauley Heart Center started its Pauley Pilot Grants program in 2017. Funded by generous philanthropy from Anne and Roger Boevé, the program — designed to bolster and support early-stage research by physicians and scientists working to advance heart health — enables investigators to test novel ideas and gather enough data to apply for major research grants from influential institutions like the American Heart Association and the National Institutes of Health. A number of projects that first got their start with Pauley Pilot funding have done just that, including projects piloted by Cory Trankle, MD, who went on to receive a Mentored Patient-Oriented Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Jordana Kron, MD, whose work led to a NIH Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant Award and an American Heart Association Collaborative Sciences Award.

The program provides pilot grants of up to $40,000 each to research proposals that meet four criteria. Projects must:

• contain an innovative idea within the areas of interest to the Pauley Heart Center;
• be feasibly completed within 12-18 months;
• encompass a mentor-mentee relationship combining an established and emerging scientific investigator team; and
• have the potential to attract additional funding.

This year’s Pauley Pilot Grants were awarded to Moriah Bellissimo, PhD, and Ajay Pillai, MD; we sat down with them recently to discuss their projects.

Moriah Bellissimo, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher at VCU. Her Pauley Pilot Grant research was born of a combined interest in the fields of cardio-oncology and nutrition. Her project will focus on what is happening in the hearts of women with breast cancer who are undergoing chemotherapy, relying on data that is coming out of Pauley’s Understanding and Predicting Breast Cancer Events After Treatment (UPBEAT) trial. Bellissimo plans to use lipidomics, a new field that concerns the study of lipids, to examine fatty acids in the blood of the women enrolled in the study. By looking at the effects of several types of cancer treatment through the lens of lipidomics, Bellissimo will investigate changes that occur in the heart and how they vary by cancer treatment type.

Bellissimo became interested in applying for the Pauley Pilot Grant because she is “interested in knowing if we can design diets for women with breast cancer that can protect their hearts during treatment, so that after they leave treatment they can remain healthy, have high-functional capabilities, live independently, and just have a better overall health and quality of life.”

Ajay Pillai, MD, is a cardiac electrophysiologist —that is, a cardiologist who specializes in heart rhythm disorders. His Pauley Pilot Grant research focuses on novel ways of pacing the heart to increase its efficiency; in his project, he will focus on a new pacing strategy known as left bundle branch area pacing (LBBAP). LBBAP, simply, is a different way of setting the heart’s rhythm with a pacemaker which focuses on stimulating the left side of the heart first.

According to Pillai, LBAPP has taken the world by storm. The goal of his project is to better understand how LBBAP affects a patient’s heart beyond when it is at rest. “We want to focus on what happens when the patient exercises because we know that at rest, they do very well [with this treatment], he explains, “less is known when the patient is under physical stress, because those aren’t the conditions you have when you’re taking an ultrasound.”

Pillai’s research is rooted in a simple procedural observation. “I was in the operating room, implanting a pacemaker,” he recalls, “I noticed that when I changed certain parameters, I was improving some markers of right-sided heart function. I thought, ‘Has anybody looked at this?’ Then, I looked at the literature and found out that there wasn’t much [research] about it at all.”

Pillai’s grandfather had a biventricular pacemaker – something that researchers and clinicians hope LBAPP can improve upon. “While it improved his life significantly, he still struggled,” Pillai says, “Especially while exercising or walking around. He never felt like he got to the quality of life he expected.” The memory of his grandfather inspires the work Pillai does today – research that he hopes will lead to better devices that will give patients the positive outcomes they deserve.