In the Medias

                        A promising breakthrough for cardiovascular therapies

Professor-researcher Pierre-Luc Boudreault and his team at the Sherbrooke Institute of Pharmacology, affiliated with the University of Sherbrooke, have made a surprising and promising discovery related to cardiovascular therapies. They have found a molecule that strengthens heart contractions without increasing blood pressure.
That is their whole objective. Dr. Boudreault, a medicinal chemist from Saguenay, and his colleagues Richard Leduc, Mannix Auger-Messier and Stéphane Laporte, are pooling all their knowledge to better understand the functioning of the heart and its different molecules, in order to create safer treatments.

This has been a long-term project for these researchers, supported by about ten students from the University of Sherbrooke. Their recent discovery, published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry , demonstrates an important step towards achieving their goal. “One of the problems we often have in cardiology is that if we increase the force of contraction of the heart, it can cause problems in some patients, such as an increase in blood pressure or an increase in the energy demand of the heart and therefore, increase the risk of arrhythmias. What we are studying is a way to increase the performance of the heart, without having these side effects,” explains Pierre-Luc Boudreault, who did his bachelor’s degree at UQAC, his doctorate at Université Laval and his postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University in California.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​