ONE of Britain’s most highly regarded heart surgeons, Professor Jaspal Kooner is on a historic mission that could save millions of lives.
With support from the Wellcome Trust and the National Institute of Health Research, Kooner established the South Asian Biobank project which has set out to answer the age-long question: “Why are the people of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka plus Asians in the UK and across the diaspora so susceptible to cardiovascular disease and diabetes?”
If he can find answers, the effect will be phenomenal.
“Just imagine the impact you will create every year in a quarter of the world’s population,” Kooner said previously to GG2 Power List.
“(Compared with the white population) Asians are at two-fold higher risk of cardiovascular disease, three-fold higher risk of diabetes and five-fold higher risk of kidney failure,” he said.
South Asia Biobank Study is a large-scale prospective study which will collect detailed health and life-style information, and biological samples in 200,000 South Asians aged between 25- and 85-years old living in the UK and South Asia.
For his project, five research centres have been set up – two in India (Delhi and Chennai), and one each in Pakistan (Lahore), Bangladesh (Dhaka) and Sri Lanka (Colombo). Patients’ details, which will be stored on computer and monitored regularly, will include “blood pressure, height and weight, body mass index, electro-cardiograms, spirometry to assess the lungs and retinal photography”.
So far as the pandemic is concerned, he asked a fundamental question: “Some Asians did not get Covid; others got Covid and survived; and others succumbed to Covid. Why?”
This is what he is trying to untangle. To try to understand what is going on with Asians, he says it is not enough simply to “take a snapshot” at any given moment in time.
To get a proper answer, what is required is a “longitudinal study” – this is research done on selected individuals over several decades.
To advance understanding of metabolic, cardiovascular and other important chronic diseases in UK South Asians, Kooner launched the Lolipop 100K, a longitudinal population study comprising 100,000 South Asian and European men and women, aged 25-85 years, under long-term follow-up for health outcomes. In this study, Kooner and his colleagues followed the health of 30,000 South Asian volunteers from West London over the past decade.
“As a consultant cardiologist in West London nearly 20 years ago, I noticed highly disproportionate levels of diabetes in my South Asian patients. This observation prompted me to start researching the causes, including the genetics,” Kooner told the British Heart Foundation on the reasons that led him to the study.
“Let’s say you have a large cohort of 100,000 people. In 10 years’ time, say 10,000 people have had heart attacks and 10,000 have not. You can then look back at the data you’ve collected at baseline, and subsequently, to begin to understand what made those 10,000 people susceptible to heart attacks and what protected the other 10,000 people from heart attacks.
“That is an unbiased way of actually understanding the disease. It allows you to make an accurate assessment of the effects of exposures like smoking, blood pressure and diabetes on the disease itself,” he said Power List previously.
His work on the biobank was disrupted by the pandemic.
Kooner, a Sikh who was born in Kenya and came to Britain in 1968, is an eminent Professor of Clinical Cardiology at Imperial College London who has done some 20,000 heart operations over the last 20 years and trained 200 cardiologists.
“I have trained over 200 cardiologists in the country and over 22,000 UK doctors have been through courses that I run,” he said Power List in 2019.
Kooner has received global recognition for his contribution to the areas of scientific research, clinical cardiovascular medicine, and training and development. Alongside this highly influential research, Kooner has mentored more than 1500 junior doctors in cardiovascular medicine, many of whom are now in senior NHS consultant posts in the UK, and overseas. He has established and leads structured education and clinical skills training courses for trainees, with over 25,000 doctors attending to date.
The Kooner family have made a significant contribution to the health service in Britain. Today, Kooner’s wife is a GP. Of their four children, his eldest daughter has trained as a cardiologist; his elder son has gone into law; his younger son has been training as a doctor at St Mary’s Hospital in London; and his second daughter has graduated in medicine from Leicester. Kooner has two brothers and a sister and they, along with their children, are all in the medical field.
Through his leadership of the South Asian Biobank, one of the largest biobanks of its kind in the world, Kooner has helped promote greater representation of ethnic minority groups in biomedical research, and has advocated for more personalised approaches to healthcare that take into account the unique genetic and environmental factors.
In 2004, Kooner was voted “doctor of the year” for the whole of the UK, and in 2013, the glossy magazine Tatler included him in a list of the country’s top doctors. The previous year, Kooner was elected a Fellow of the prestigious Academy of Medical Sciences, one of only a handful of cardiac surgeons who have been so honoured.