Atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) is the main cause of mortality in Europe. During the last decades, successful strategies have been developed to treat ASCVD targeting traditional and novel risk factors leading to an unprecedented arsenal to reduce the cardiovascular disease burden. Unfortunately, current strategies are all aimed at adding novel therapeutic agents on top of the standard therapeutic moieties, adopting the one-size-fits-all dogma. This strategy has major limitations including unaddressed heterogeneity of patients, ignoring patients’ side-effects, lack of response to therapy and decreased compliance. With ATHERONETH, we aim to bring forward stratification tools that help to improve the prediction of the actual cardiovascular risk of individual patients, and in particular the pathophysiological mechanisms the contribute to this risk in the individual patient. This will allow clinicians to better tailor their therapeutic regimens.
The Research
Our main objective is to identify biological parameters that can be utilized to better stratify patients with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease for improved and personalized prevention and treatment. Utilization can be reached by finding circulating biomarkers or imaging characteristics that reflect plaque phenotypes, underlying pathophysiology, and ASCVD incidence.
By combining frontline knowledge, clinical data resources and multimodal technologies, the consortium members will execute the following workplan.
1 - In ATHERONETH we will fine-tune the local phenotypic diversity of human plaques on a multi-omics level and define plaque types that associate with biology and clinical events. These plaque types will be associated with systemic read-outs (biomarkers).
2 - We will define systemic inflammatory and lipid metabolism related determinants of heterogeneity in plaque phenotype and ASCVD.
3 - We will utilise existing data from (large) cohorts to determine (epi)genetic, lipidomic/proteomic, and microbiome-related biomarkers of ASCVD and build algorithms that define subgroups of patients.
4 -We will study imaging parameters of plaque characteristics and inflammation that point to differential disease progression and potential treatment benefit.
The Origin
AtheroNeth leverages scientific power that was generated over the past decade by (inter)national research consortia. This consortium resulted from the DCVA exploration on atherosclerosis. Our vision for the future is to achieve a reduction in ASCVD-associated morbidity and mortality, an improvement in the quality of life for patients, and a reduction of the associated healthcare burden and costs.
Our program has a strong match with the challenges as reported in the “Nationale Hart en Vaat agenda” (National Cardiovascular Agenda) of the Dutch Heart Foundation. It is evident that the current proposal addresses the challenges “Oog voor verschillen” (Eye for differences) and “Behandel op maat” (Tailored treatment).
