BHF-funded Dr Desmond Julian (who later went on to become a BHF Professor) pioneered the coronary care unit – a ward dedicated to the intensive care of heart patients – and set up the UK’s first one in 1964.

Dr Julian’s cardiac care ward reduced deaths from heart attacks by a third in its first year alone, meaning many more people could survive and return home to their families.

Thanks in part to gifts in Wills to the BHF, the care and treatment that heart patients receive has dramatically advanced over the decades.

Today, coronary care units are found in every major hospital in the UK, treating and saving the lives of thousands of patients each year.

In 1966, Dr Frank Pantridge received a BHF grant to install a portable defibrillator in an ambulance. This breakthrough gave ambulance crews the chance to save the lives of those who experienced cardiac arrest, wherever they were, for the first time. These days you’ll find one in every emergency ambulance in the UK.

Today, public defibrillators can be found in towns and cities across the UK. Thanks to gifts in Wills we’ve helped to install more than 5,000 in local communities since 2014, giving the public better access to them when they’re needed most.

Administering CPR alongside a defibrillator can double the chances of surviving an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.

In 1967, BHF-funded surgeon Mr Donald Ross performed the first ‘homograft’ heart valve replacement at Guy’s Hospital, which replaced the patient’s diseased aortic valve with a preserved human heart valve. This technique is used worldwide to this day.

A year after pioneering his first aortic valve procedure, surgeon Mr Donald Ross performed the UK’s first heart transplant. BHF funding played an important role in the development of this procedure – now, around 200 are carried out in the UK each year.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, BHF-funded surgeons – including Sir Terence English and Sir Magdi Yacoub – helped to make heart transplantation a successful reality in the UK. Sir Terence performed the UK’s first transplant with long-term success on 18th August 1979.

Dr Noseda is using an advanced technology called single cell transcriptomics. It’s a complex technology, but it’s doing something extraordinary – uncovering the unique features and functions of each type of cell in our heart.

Gifts in Wills help researchers make the most of the cutting-edge equipment found in labs like Dr Noseda’s. This helps her and her team to study the heart’s cells in levels of detail that have not been possible before.

Dr Noseda’s team is based at Imperial College London, the historic home of many past breakthroughs in heart research. With help from gifts in Wills, she and her team could make it the home of the future breakthroughs that help us finally defeat heart failure.

Dr Noseda and her team have mapped out the human heart in astonishing detail. They’ve discovered unique features of different cell types – and that each area of the heart has a specific set of cells.

This image shows the innermost layer of the heart wall, the endocardium. A single layer of cells, it shows perfectly how the heart can be strong and delicate at the same time.

The endothelium is the layer of cells that line the inside of the heart and blood vessels. A healthy endothelium helps to keep our blood vessels relaxed, and helps the flow of blood. It also releases substances that help prevent harmful blood clots and inflammation.

If Dr Noseda can understand what makes each type of heart cell special, she’ll be able to compare the differences between healthy hearts and diseased ones. In the future, that knowledge could be used to give people treatments bespoke to their condition and develop drugs which target only the cells that aren’t working properly – such as those damaged by a heart attack.

This image shows cardiac myocytes. These cells, which make up the muscles of the heart and make it contract, have a single nucleus in the middle – the part that contains the cell’s genetic material. This is a key difference between these cells and other muscle cells (like those which, for example, move our arms and legs) which have many nuclei.

Dr Nodesa’s work, and the gifts left to the BHF that could help fund it, could even get us closer to developing heart cell regeneration – and put an end to heart failure.