MORE than £500,000 has been awarded to two Oxford scientists for heart disease research.

Dr Jurgen Schneider, British Heart Foundation senior basic science research fellow at Oxford University, has been given £260,906 by the charity for his project titled ‘Can MRI help scientists assess the detailed structure of the heart?’

Oxford colleague Dr Carolyn Carr has been awarded £263,586 for her research titled ‘Do beating heart cells grown in the lab act like normal heart cells?’

Dr Schneider, based at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics and who has been funded by the charity for 13 years, will be working to find out if MRI scans can be used as a reliable tool in the clinic to assess heart microstructure.

Dr Carr will study stem cells grown in the lab to find out if they can change their metabolism and the nutrients they use to become fully mature heart cells.