Personalized medicine for cardiovascular disease (CVD) could receive a huge boost through the application of the latest biomedical technologies, researchers report, but global leadership and partnership across many branches of healthcare are needed.
Clinicians believe that omics, systems biology and artificial intelligence hold the key to a new generation of CVD therapies and could result in a sea change in how these drugs are created.
In a review article published in Frontiers In Science, the team highlights the potential importance of RNA and digitally designed drugs to treat diseases that are currently deemed “undruggable.”
But the investigators add that collaboration between scientists, industry, and healthcare are crucial—together with worldwide leadership—for this to happen.
“There’s no single version of CVD, so to treat patients more effectively we need bespoke medicines that reflect the broad spectrum of CVDs,” explained researcher Joseph Loscalzo, PhD, from Harvard Medical School.
“This means harnessing technological advances to map the complex networks of genes, proteins, and pathways that differ between individuals—and identify how best to target them.
“This is how we make the ‘untreatable’ treatable: by spotting new drug targets within individual patients and designing new molecules specifically for them.”
CVD is projected to climb from 19 million deaths in 2020 to 26 million deaths by 2030 and precision medicine could alter this trajectory.
Fundamental to the development of these tailored treatments are several cutting-edge technologies that could drastically alter the way CVD drugs are created, developed, and tested.
Omics offers a vital tool and could provide unprecedented information through the use of disciplines such as genomics and proteomics, which involve studying the entire complement of DNA or proteins in a cell or organism.
Systems biology could also play a key role in understanding the bigger picture. This interdisciplinary approach examines vastly complex biological systems to determine how components such as cells, genes, and proteins interact and provides a way of integrating multiomics so that the behavior of these systems can be modeled and predicted.
Artificial intelligence also has shown great potential for speedily analyzing disease pathways, spotting novel drug targets, and designing agents that act upon these.
The researchers single out the development of RNA-based therapeutics as particularly useful in targeting specific genes rather than their products and early trials suggest these agents could lower cholesterol more effectively than current therapies.
“RNA therapies are already opening the door to tackle disease pathways long considered ‘undruggable,’ and with strong global leadership, we can bring new precision medicines to patients faster and save lives from CVD,” said lead author Masanori Aikawa, MD, PhD, also from Harvard.
But his team adds that greater collaboration between academia, industry, and healthcare will be crucial for this potential to be fully realized.
“To save lives from CVD, we urgently need a new standard approach,” said co-author Sarvesh Chelvanambi, PhD, also at Harvard.
“That means bold investment, open science, and new partnerships across academia, industry, and healthcare. Right now, this paradigm isn’t in place—even in high-income countries. Global leadership is vital to mobilize the funding, resources, and policies that will make it a reality worldwide.”
