Scripps Wins Grant for Heart Study : Medicine: The $9.1-million award is part of a seven-year national project to research vascular disease.

Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute and the VA Hospital in La Jolla have won a $9.1-million grant to study vascular diseases, including stroke and heart attack.

The grant is part of a $56.9-million, seven-year National Institutes of Health project that will also fund vascular disease research at Harvard, Stanford and Emory universities and the University of Alabama.

The NIH grants include funding for basic laboratory research, but the agency’s goal is “work that translates into new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches,” said Mark Ginsberg, a leading vascular biology researcher at Scripps. “They are interested in direct clinical applicability.”

Researchers know that vascular disease is caused by the blockage of blood vessels, but “we know very little about the molecular events that actually go on when a blood vessel is injured,” said Carol Letendre, an associate director for scientific programs at the NIH. “Before therapies can be developed, we have to know at a basic level what the molecular (cause) is.”

The grant will allow Scripps to continue its pioneering research into the molecular messages and interactions that cause vascular cells to grow and to adhere to each other. That cell interaction is important because improper cell adhesion causes strokes, heart attacks and potentially deadly blood clots.

The NIH funds will also advance research into restenosis, the gradual narrowing of blood vessels that occurs in nearly 40% of patients who have undergone balloon angioplasty to open blood vessels that are blocked by plaque. While angioplasty reopens blood vessels, it often damages the walls of blood vessels, causing them to gradually narrow.

“By determining how restenosis happens, we hope to design new strategies or medications to prevent it,” said William Penny, director of the VA Hospital’s Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory.

Scripps researchers are also using their newly gained knowledge of molecular biology to develop an effective treatment for thrombosis--the potentially deadly formation of blood clots. Some of the NIH grant money will support ongoing research aimed at fashioning a molecular “key” that, when inserted into blood platelets, will halt unwanted clotting, Scripps researcher Zaverio Ruggeri said.

The American Heart Assn. earmarked $95.1 million for vascular research during its most recent fiscal year. Vascular disease accounts for about 45% of deaths each year in the United States.

Vascular research “is at an exciting point in time” because scientists are deciphering the messages that cause cells to interact within blood vessels and create disease, said W. Virgil Brown, a professor of medicine at Emory University and past president of the American Heart Assn.

“We know a lot of pieces of the (vascular disease) jigsaw puzzle,” Brown said. “But there are more pieces to be discovered.”