Dr. Tim Allerton, Assistant Professor and Director of the Vascular Metabolism Laboratory at LSU’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center, has been awarded a prestigious National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 research grant totaling up to $3.6 million to investigate a promising new approach to treating one of the fastest-growing forms of heart failure.

The five-year grant from the NIH National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute will support research into heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), a condition that affects millions of Americans and is now the most common form of heart failure. Unlike other forms of heart failure, people with HFpEF have a heart that ejects a normal amount of blood with each beat. However, the heart muscle has difficulty relaxing and filling properly, which can lead to debilitating fatigue and exercise intolerance. Research from Dr. Allerton’s laboratory has shown that these symptoms are also driven by abnormalities in skeletal muscle and blood vessel function, which further impair exercise capacity and overall physical function.

Modern medicine increasingly relies on targeted drug delivery - a process during which tiny particles (nanoparticles) transport drugs to specific parts of the body. To ensure these treatments are safe and effective, scientists need to understand exactly how these nanoparticles are built - including their size, shape, and internal structure.

In this study, an international team combined several advanced analysis techniques to investigate drug delivery nanoparticles in unprecedented detail. For the first time, they successfully coupled a particle separation method known as AF4 with small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) during an experiment performed on the D11 instrument at the Insitut Laue-Langevin (ILL).

This new approach allowed the researchers not only to measure the nanoparticles’ size and shape, but also to determine how these particles and drug molecules were organised internally. The work opens up new possibilities for using neutron scattering to study increasingly sophisticated drug delivery systems and could help support the development of safer and more effective treatments in the future.

Researchers at Binghamton University, State University of New York were among the first to find ways to help patients of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), with the development of an effective drug. A new study suggests earlier use of this FDA-approved therapy may improve outcomes.