Associate Professor James McFadyen

Developing new and safer therapies to prevent and treat blood clots

Associate Professor James McFadyen, Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute

2022 Future Leader Fellowship - Level 1

Years funded: 2023-2026

Blood clots are the cause of huge health and economic burdens and are responsible for over a quarter of all deaths worldwide. However, current treatments that are used to treat blood clots (and their complications, such as heart attacks) have significant limitations. These include bleeding complications that can result from blood-thinning medications, the lack of treatments to prevent heart injury after heart attack, and a limited ability to accurately predict which patients are most at risk of developing blood clots.

This project aims to address these key issues and reduce the enormous health burden of blood clots in Australia by:

1. Developing new treatments to prevent and treat blood clots that do not cause bleeding,
2. Developing new ways to identify patients at high risk of blood clots to allow the personalised use of blood thinning medication,
3. Developing a new treatment to prevent heart damage after heart attack, and
4. Understanding how vaccines might cause blood clotting complications, to enable the development of safer vaccines