In 2020, Women’s Health Access Matters (WHAM) was founded by Carolee Lee, who convened a group of businesswomen motivated to create an innovative dialogue and establish data on why women have been left so far behind in medical research. This lead to the creation of the WHAM Report, their Investigators Fund, and their Research and Investment Collaboratives. WHAM believes that the lives of women and men will vastly improve through research that is equally inclusive of women and men in trials – and female and male animals in preliminary research. By conducting research in parity and reporting gender outcomes separately, health breakthroughs will be accelerated, and health outcomes around the world improved.
The Connors Center is the Lead Scientific Research Partner of WHAM. The Connors Center shares the bold vision of improving the health of women and a commitment to joining forces to advance scientific discovery for the benefit of all women.
Women’s Health Access Matters (WHAM), awarded $150,000 to the Connors Center to support the study “Identification of Novel Pathways that Contribute to Heart Disease in Women,” led by BWH Cardiologist and Connors Center Faculty Affiliate Michelle O’Donoghue, MD, MPH.
The overall goal of her study is to apply comprehensive, state-of-the-art emerging technologies that leverage information derived from our DNA through to the proteins encoded by our DNA (also known as “omics”-based technologies) to identify women at risk of heart disease and further delineate the underlying causal pathways that contribute to its development.
Dr. O’Donoghue is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a member of the Cardiovascular Division at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She is a Senior Investigator in the Thrombolysis in Myocardial Infarction (TIMI) Study Group, founded by Dr. Eugene Braunwald.
Dr. O’Donoghue’s primary research focus is the design and conduct of multicenter clinical trials for patients with stable and unstable coronary disease with a special interest in the study of women and heart disease, including establishing the efficacy and safety of therapeutics in women. Additional clinical research interests include the evaluation of novel antiplatelet drugs, established and novel biomarkers and the development of novel therapeutics in the management of atherosclerosis and diabetes mellitus.
Dr. O’Donoghue earned her medical degree from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. She completed her residency in internal medicine and fellowship in cardiovascular medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. She subsequently completed a Masters in Public Health degree at the Harvard School of Public Health.
In 2022, Connors Member Leilah Grant, PhD received a WHAM Edge Award in support of her study “Time-restricted eating as a novel dietary intervention for cardiovascular disease prevention in at-risk perimenopausal women”.
Dr. Grant is an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Physiologist in the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She is also a Mary Ann Tynan Research Scientist and a ROSA Pilot Awardee.