Multiscale computational and experimental investigation of ventricular arrhythmogenesis in diabetes

Diabetes mellitus, a metabolic disease characterised by high blood sugar levels, affects 463 million people worldwide. The leading cause of death in diabetes is ventricular arrhythmia, a disturbance of cardiac electrical activity, which remains poorly understood given the difficulty of clinical investigation and lack of translational animal models. I propose to tackle this problem by combining state-of-the-art human-specific computational simulations with new experiments. Building on my recent successful computational model of a human cardiac cell, I will aim to elucidate which aspects of diabetic remodelling promote arrhythmia and how. I will investigate factors such as cell-level remodelling, blood sugar levels, brain-heart communication, and clinically informed structural changes. Ultimately, I will develop new computational methodology to search for promising therapies to treat diabetic arrhythmogenesis. This project will improve our understanding of diabetic arrhythmia and is expected to lead to population-level and personalised translational applications, potentially positively impacting millions of people worldwide.