Dr. Nils Bömer of the department of Cardiology has been awarded an NWO Open Competition Domain Science-XS grant worth 50.000 euros

The grant will fund his application: ‘Oral Selenium supplementation to treat severe heart failure; “do they get it?”’. Within this pilot-project, with the duration of 1 year, he will dive deeper into the link between selenium and heart failure, and especially assess the treatment efficiency of oral selenium supplementation in patients with end-stage heart failure. See this short summary:

”An aberrant equilibrium of circulating molecules like micronutrients (eg. Selenium) in the patients’ blood are closely associated with the development and progression of heart failure. Restoring the balance could be a potent treatment strategy. Assessing treatment efficiency of oral selenium supplementation, at the target tissue in human subjects, is very innovative in the field of heart failure. When proving that oral selenium supplementation indeed reaches the heart, this will be the exciting starting point for conducting thorough clinical trials, assessing the effect of oral Se supplementation on clinical symptoms and prognosis in HF patients.”

The Open Competition Domain Science – XS grants of a maximum of € 50,000 are intended to support promising ideas and to facilitate innovative and more speculative initiatives within the seven Domain Science disciplines. The proposed research is ground-breaking and high-risk. What counts is that all results, be they positive or negative, must contribute to the advancement of science.