Chiara Evans

One Brave Idea

The One Brave Idea Team comprises a group of leading scientists from multiple disciplines working together to understand the earliest stages of coronary heart disease (CHD). They are exploring how CHD develops and how we can stop it from leading to heart attacks and strokes. Over the past several decades, we have learned a lot – but it's not enough. Research has become too incremental, conducted by teams that were too narrow and lacking the powerhouse funding to bring together the best and brightest minds. Our team is changing that by pairing a unique model of science with a new funding approach and a never-before-seen level of cross-enterprise collaboration. In addition to major financial support, our funding organizations are providing expertise and additional in-kind resources, including access to the American Heart Association's medical and scientific networks, Verily's data analysis capabilities, AstraZeneca's cardiovascular research data. Dr. Calum MacRae, Vice Chair for Scientific Innovation in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), and his world-class team were selected as the recipients of the One Brave Idea research award. The team is made up of investigators from a wide variety of disciplines, such as cardiology, data science, and engineering. Each has experience breaking down boundaries and working outside the constraints of traditional biomedical science. The team will work out of the One Brave Idea Science Innovation Center in Boston to facilitate new techniques in a clinical context, where they will have access to a national consortium of translational scientists, the engineering know-how of MIT, and the clinical device expertise of BWH's Next Generation Phenotyping Center.