LUMC talent Edouard Fu receives NWO Rubicon grant to conduct research at Harvard Medical School

Edouard Fu, PhD student at the Department of Clinical Epidemiology at the LUMC, uses big data to study the effectiveness and safety of kidney, diabetes and heart failure treatments. With a Rubicon grant from NWO, Edouard will conduct further research at Harvard Medical School over the next two years.

In the first round of Rubicon 2021, a total of 24 newly graduated scientists were selected to conduct research abroad at prestigious institutions such as Oxford and Harvard. 

Wonder drugs for diabetics?

Sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibitors are a new group of medications used for treating patients with type 2 diabetes, kidney disease, or heart failure. The potential impact of this novel medication class is enormous: type 2 diabetes currently affects more than 400 million people worldwide, whereas heart failure is the leading cause of hospitalizations in the Western world. 

Considered a breakthrough in the treatment of diabetes and heart failure, Edouard Fu – however – highlights that initial clinical trials on the effectiveness and safety of SGLT2 inhibitors do not portray the whole picture quite yet. “These trials included very selective patient populations and their study size and duration is often not sufficient to investigate rare – but potentially serious safety outcomes. By applying cutting-edge statistical methods to big data of more than 200 million patients, we will be able to investigate the effectiveness and safety of these drugs in patients with diabetes and heart failure in a real-life setting.” 

Read the full article here.