Dr Bart Spronck (Dept of BME) is awarded a prestigious Vidi grant from NWO for the project 'The aorta as a key to personalised treatment of high blood pressure'. 

Patients with elevated blood pressure are often treated with medications that relax the muscle cells in their smallest arteries, causing these arteries to dilate and blood pressure to drop. In some patients, such medications are ineffective, possibly because they also dilate the aorta. This project investigates how aortic vasodilation affects the blood pressure dampening effect of the aorta, and whether this explains why these drugs are sometimes not effective. Using the resulting data, a computer model is developed to predict whether vasodilatory antihypertensive treatment will be beneficial or detrimental to the individual patient, allowing optimal treatment from the start.

NWO has granted a maximum of 850.000 euros to 149 scientists from the domain Science (ENW), Applied and Engineering Sciences (AES) and Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) domains, as well as Health, Research and Development (ZonMw). With the help of the Vidi grant, the talented scientists can start their own line of research and further develop their talent