Focus on IPAH (PPH) Medical Research

The Cardiovascular Medical Research and Education Fund (CMREF) was created as a non-profit fund operated solely for charitable, scientific and educational purposes. The CMREF mission is the support of research to uncover the etiology and pathogenesis of idiopathic pulmonary arterial hypertension (IPAH, or PPH), in pursuit of the ultimate goal of its treatment and cure.

The immediate objectives are a) to define the cellular basis of IPAH through the study of affected lung tissue, b) to describe the molecular pathways involved in the disease, and c) to identify genetic associations with the IPAH clinical phenotype.

In order to pursue this mission, CMREF is organizing a IPAH Research Network that it will fund through its awards program.

This research initiative is designed to support the establishment of a network of multidisciplinary, collaborative transplant and research centers each headed by an investigator interested in studying the pathogenesis of IPAH. A databank and coordinating center has been established and is responsible for the design, maintenance and analysis of the IPAH database. The study of IPAH presents opportunities to investigators working at levels ranging from molecular to clinical, in the fields of pharmacology, physiology, genetics, genomics, medicine, surgery, epidemiology, statistics, bioinformatics and computational biology.