Despite effective lipid-lowering therapies, patients remain at risk of cardiovascular disease. By 2030, cardiovascular disease (CVD) is expected to affect about 41% of the Western population. This increase will significantly raise healthcare costs, with U.S. expenditures on CVD projected to triple between 2010 and 2030.
Many CVD drugs fail in clinical trials due to a lack of efficacy, leading to substantial financial losses for pharmaceutical companies. This highlights the need for better experimental models that more accurately predict clinical outcomes. There is an unmet need for “human models” of atherosclerosis to test drug efficacy.
Our team at UMC Utrecht has developed Athero-Screen: a data-driven platform that leverages one of the world’s largest and best-phenotyped human atherosclerotic biobanks to predict drug efficacy and side effects. By combining experimental RNA sequencing with our “virtual gene editing” algorithm, we simulate how human plaques respond to various treatments, without the need to test directly in patients. Acting as a safe and GDPR-compliant intermediary between hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, we enable clinically relevant predictions of drug effects.
