Two King's scientists have been awarded a share of prestigious EU grants worth €18 million for projects that seek understand the link between body fat and heart health, and find an equation to unify and explain complex systems.
Mauro Giacca, Professor of Cardiovascular Sciences, Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine, will receive a slice of €10 million to lead a strand of the ADIPOhealth project, which will investigate the relationship between adipose tissue and heart health. Benjamin Doyon, Professor of Theoretical Physics in the disordered systems group in the Faculty of Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences, has been awarded part of an €10 million grant for his project UniCIPS, which aims to find an equation that could unify and explain complex systems composed of many small constituent parts, such as liquids, living matter, and even the universe.
The money has been given by the European Research Council (ERC) Synergy Grants, a renowned programme under the EU's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme designed to foster collaboration between outstanding researchers to help them solve science's toughest puzzles.
Understanding how adipose tissue influences heart health
Scientists have long been aware of the association between obesity and cardiac disease and heart failure. For a long time, it was thought that high cholesterol and plaque buildup in the arteries caused by obesity were the key triggers for poor heart health. However, researchers now know that body fat - otherwise known as adipose tissue - has a complex role in heart health and acts similarly to an endocrine organ that can release metabolites and inflammatory proteins that damage the heart. The goal of ADIPOhealth is to identify which molecules in the adipose tissue are damaging the heart and find ways to neutralise them.
Professor Giacca's lab, which has been awarded over €2.3 million for its role, will focus on using high throughput screening to quickly test large numbers of small signalling proteins called cytokines to identify which ones can harm heart muscle cell walls. They will then search for substances that can prevent this damage. ADIPOhealth is led by the Madrid-based Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), with support from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Copenhagen.
Understanding how body fat contributes to heart disease is one of the most pressing challenges in cardiovascular research today. Through this project, we aim to uncover the specific molecules produced by adipose tissue that can harm the heart, paving the way for new therapies that could save countless lives."
Mauro Giacca, Professor of Cardiovascular Sciences, Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine
The research ties in with the findings from the Commission on Global Obesity, published earlier this year, that called for a reframing of the clinical diagnosis of obesity. The report, which was chaired by Francesco Rubino, Professor of Bariatric Surgery at King's, proposed that obesity should only be considered a disease when excess fat causes impairment in the function of organs or the whole body.
Towards a powerful framework for explaining complex systems
Professor Doyon's project is about solving one of the most fundamental problems in science: how large-scale patterns and behaviours emerge from the interactions of many small parts.
One of the most complex problems in modern science is to predict what happens at a 'large scale' by looking at the behaviour of the tiny constituent parts that things are made of. This can be anything from big fluctuations in international markets to neurons in the brain interacting with each other to produce thoughts, to the behaviour of particles at the quantum scale."
Professor Doyon, Department of Mathematics
"The theories of thermodynamics and hydrodynamics, which explain how molecules in air and water give rise to wind and waves, shed some light on the problem, but modern science aims to go beyond this.
"There is a need to understand how what happens at the tiniest scales or lengths, often dominated by quantum physics, informs behaviours at vast distances. These so-called 'emergent' behaviours can be surprising and difficult to understand, and we are missing a powerful framework to explain them."
The goal of Professor Doyon and his team on the ERC Synergy grant is to unveil a universal closed equation for correlations in all interacting particle systems, and the underlying theoretical framework. He will work with Drs Olivier Bénichou and Aurélien Grabsch from the Sorbonne University and Dr Kirone Mallick from Paris-Saclay.
A theoretical physicist and leading expert on many-body quantum physics and hydrodynamics in the Department of Mathematics, Professor Doyon co-pioneered a highly successful theoretical framework referred to as Generalised Hydrodynamics (GHD). He is the Principal Investigator on a five-year ERC Horizon Advanced Grant, and the recipient of the 2022 John William Strutt, Lord Rayleigh Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics, the 2020 AHP Birkhauser and 2024 Journal of Physics A best paper prizes, and a 2025 Frontiers of Science Award from the International Congress of Basic Science. He is also a Will International Chair (2025 - 2029) at Lille University.
