This award, created in 1970, goes to young investigators working in clinical or basic-science cardiovascular research. The investigator must be either a research trainee or researcher in his or her first independent university or hospital appointment at the time of submission.

Dr. Sébastien Bonnet

Light at the End of the Tunnel?

Dr. Sébastien Bonnet, Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at Université Laval and Canada Research Chair in Vascular Remodelling Diseases, fell into cardiology by accident, but he has never looked back.

"My first mentor was a cardiologist working on pulmonary hypertension (PH) in babies," he says. "Seeing how this lethal disease predominantly strikes young people touched me and inspired me to find a cure."

Bonnet has found an important clue; a protein called pim-1 that exists at higher levels than normal in patients with PH. The higher the pim-1, the more severe the PH. And not only is it expressed in the arteries but also in the blood, making it a very valuable potential biomarker.

"PH currently has no biomarkers," says Bonnet. "To be diagnosed, patients must undergo an ultrasound, a very invasive right catheterization, an angiogram, an MRI or the six-minute-walk test. Many patients are too sick for those."

Bonnet hopes that measuring pim-1 through a simple blood test instead will save time and money. His next step, which he has just started, is to verify through a larger-scale study involving 200-300 patients that the blood test will be more accurate than other diagnostic methods.

Bonnet's second discovery is that blocking pim-1 reverses PH in animal models—a thought that thrills him.

"If we kill the protein, we reverse the disease and rescue the patient/model," he says. "This is a completely new breakthrough that directly affects patients."

Bonnet's paper on the subject has been invited for revision in the highly rated journal, Science Translational Medicine.