Quenton Hurst (PhD student; Pitt group) joins the SCF Board as an early career member. The ECR committee are responsible for SCF social media updates, sharing news on exciting cardiovascular research, contributing to the organisation of SCF annual conferences and connecting fellow CVD researchers.

Congratulations Quenton!

The Scottish Cardiovascular Forum Annual meeting was held in Edinburgh February 2025.

Boyang Lin (Stewart Group) gave a talk titled “Assessing the Association between Plasma Metal Ion Levels and Cardiovascular Health: A Comparative Analysis Using Electronic Health Records from the Scottish Population.

Quenton Hurst (Pitt group) gave a poster presentation titled “The Role of MG23 in Dox Induced Cardiac Dysfunction”

Xueyu Guo (Pitt group) gave a poster presentation titled “Analysis of TMEM109 rare genetic variation underlying cardiovascular diseases and traits
among 500,000 individuals in the UK Biobank”

Jothi Kumar (Pitt group) gave a poster titled “Fluorescence microscopy approaches to monitor cell-to-cell heterogeneity in the regulation of cardiomyocyte contractility”

Abbi Crichton (Pitt group) gave a poster titled “Doxorubicin Modulates Mitsugumin 23 driving altered cellular Ca2+ dynamics and contractility in vascular smooth muscle”

Was great to see a large St Andrews cardiovascular presence at this meeting!

Between 13th-17th February Dr Alan Stewart gave both a Workshop and Keynote Talk at the Advances in Proteomics Technologies (APT) 2025 meeting at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai. He expresses his thanks to the organisers, particularly Prof Sanjeeva Srivastava for the invitation to speak at the conference.

Also while in India, he visited Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna Univeristy (Tehri), Swami Rama Himalayan Univeristy (Doiwala) and Apeejay Stya Univeristy (Gurgaon), where he spoke about his work. He is grateful to Prof Asha Chandola-Saklani (ASU) for organising these visits.

Samantha Pitt & Malcolm White (Biology) were awarded a BBSRC research grant to study MCpol and the CrAMPs: Probing the ancestry and diversity
of CRISPR immunity.

On 13 November 2024, the School of Medicine hosted the Tenovus Tayside and Northeast Fife Symposium. The event was organised by Reader and Cellular Medicine Division Head Dr Samantha Pitt, who is also a Tenovus Scotland local scientific advisory committee member.

The symposium showcased the impressive range of research from the Universities of Dundee and St Andrews made possible by Tenovus through oral and poster presentations by PhD students and early career researchers. From cardiovascular science to cancer, each project approached an issue of great clinical relevance from a new perspective.

Dr Ify Mordi, Clinical Senior Lecturer and British Heart Foundation Intermediate Clinical Research Fellow at the University of Dundee, delivered a keynote talk entitled, ‘The importance of what we can’t see – Small vessels in cardiovascular disease.’

Alongside the formal presentations, the symposium offered a valuable opportunity for PhD, early-career, and established researchers to connect at the closing reception. This provided an ideal environment for attendees to discuss collaboration opportunities, share new findings, and seek guidance from those at a later career stage

Samantha Pitt has recently accepted an invitation to join the British Heart Foundation’s (BHF) Fellowships Committee. The committee meets four times a year to assess applications for PhD studentships, basic science research and clinical research fellowships.

On 4^th September Dr Alan Stewart organised and hosted a networking event in St Andrews on behalf of SULSA and the German Research Foundation (DFG). The event, which was a joint event between the Universities of St Andrews and Dundee and the James Hutton Institute, saw a delegation of 23 academics from various German Universities of Applied Sciences and DFG representatives come together to discuss potential collaborations and bilateral funding opportunities. The theme of the day was Health and Environment and around a dozen academics across the three Scottish institutions, including Profs. Nick Feasey and Colin McCowan from the School of Medicine presented their research. The VP (Research, Collections and Innovation), Prof Tom Brown gave an introduction to the University at the event.

Dr Alan Stewart and PhD student Hasnain Ahmed attended the 9th International Caparica Conference on Analytical Proteomics in Caparica, Portugal. Held from 23-27 June, the meeting focused on precision biochemistry and medicine. Dr Stewart gave an invited talk entitled “Identification of plasma proteins that bind zinc displaced by fatty acids from albumin.” Hasnain gave a prize-winning shotgun poster presentation focused on the identification of prognostic markers for oesophageal adenocarcinoma using metabolomic and proteomic approaches. Congratulations, Hasnain!

A special issue of Frontiers in Endocrinology focussed on “Insulin resistance and cardiovascular disease” has been just published. The issue, which was edited by Drs Alan Stewart and Samantha Pitt and well as Dr Erkan Tuncay (Ankara University) and Dr Richard Rainbow (University of Liverpool), includes 8 new articles that successfully explore the mechanisms by which insulin resistance contributes to cardiovascular diseases including atherosclerosis, hypertensive disorders, heart disease and metabolic syndrome.

A link to the editorial summarising this special issue can be found here.

A research grant of £324,643 has been awarded to Dr Alan Stewart and Prof Ramzi Ajjan (University of Leeds) from Diabetes UK to carry out a new 30-month study entitled “Magnesium deficiency as a reversible driver of vascular complications in type 1 diabetes”.

People with type 1 diabetes (T1D) are at a higher risk of developing vascular problems where blockages in the blood vessels, caused by unwanted clot formation, limit the flow of blood. This, in turn, can causes heart attacks and strokes which are serious conditions that can be fatal or impair quality of life.

We previously found that people with T1D can have lower blood magnesium levels compared to those without diabetes. Magnesium is an essential nutrient important for health and our work has also shown that the lower the level of blood magnesium, the more difficult it is for a blood clot to break down after it forms. This increases the risk of blood vessel occlusion and consequently adverse health conditions.

In this new study, we will take blood samples from people with T1D with low blood levels of magnesium to examine in detail clot formation and breakdown, which will help to understand the exact mechanism(s) involved. Importantly, we will assess whether providing magnesium supplements to people with T1D helps to normalise blood clotting profile to match, or at least come close, to people without diabetes. It is hoped that this work may provide a simple and affordable treatment to reduce the formation of dangerous blood clots in people with T1D.