A Shipley-born professor who is one of the country’s leading heart scientists has won a £1.5 million charity award for research into repairing the organs of heart attack victims.

Professor Paul Riley has been appointed the British Heart Foundation Professor of Regenerative Medicine and will move to Oxford University to expand his team’s groundbreaking research to develop a drug to repair damaged hearts.

They have already discovered a protein in mice which causes heart cells to grow in early development – a discovery which may lead to developing a drug to repair the damage caused by a heart attack.

For more on this story, see today's T&A