The Partridge family has run a jewellery business for 160 years and has launched a new research laureate scheme to improve the health of New Zealanders.
Professor Julian Paton from the Department of Physiology, together with Dr Amanda Dixon McIver from IGENZ, Auckland, recently became the inaugural Partridge Laureates. They are funded to assess whether it is possible to predict the best medication type to treat high blood pressure (hypertension).
Currently, drug prescriptions for hypertension are empirical, often best guess, causing long delays before blood pressure is controlled and puts patients at serious risk of an adverse event.
Given the prevalence of blood pressure (~25%) and that it is the single most important risk factor for cardiovascular disease, the project has enormous potential to make a clinical impact nationwide.