Many people with chronic kidney disease slowly develop a particular kind of heart failure. The heart still contracts normally, but it grows stiff and no longer fills properly with blood. Doctors call this heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, or HFpEF. Patients often die early, and there are still few effective drugs.

Why failing kidneys reshape the heart is not yet understood. One possible cause is scarring of the heart muscle, triggered by waste products that build up in the blood once the kidneys can no longer clear them. Studying this has been difficult, because human heart tissue and fitting models were missing.

This is where the project comes in. Using new methods, it maps diseased heart tissue down to a few micrometers and shows which genes are switched on in individual cells. Novel discoveries are then tested in miniature hearts grown in the lab from stem cells. The goal is to understand how kidney and heart are connected, and to find starting points for new treatments.