Identification of risk genes for atherothrombosis in coronary artery disease by transcriptome and proteome analysis and high throughput exon resequencing.

The Bloodomics consortium has brought together a multidisciplinary team from 8 world leading academic centres across Europe. At the centre of the project is the Candidate Gene Discovery Programme, which has identified genes with functional relevance in platelets and coronary artery disease. These genes are currently being genotyped in large cohorts of patients to test if they are associated with a higher disease risk. The function of risk genes will be studied by functional genomics to discover novel therapeutic targets in platelets.

http://www.bloodomics.org/web/

Identification of genetic roots of coronary artery disease by combining stepwise genome wide association studies with transcriptomic and functional genomic investigation of relevant genetic variants

The four year project Cardiogenics aims to identify risk genes for coronary artery disease (CAD) and myocardial infarction (MI) using genome-wide based strategies. The research spanning from genome-wide mapping to cell biology will determine the physiological roles of genes and proteins implicated in CAD/MI genetics and thus lead to the identification of novel drugable targets. Important results have already been achieved during the first two years of the project - starting from the very first systematic genome-wide association study for the inheritance of myocardial infarction published in the respected New England Journal of Medicine (Samani et al. 2007) and reaching the latest three articles in Nature Genetics (February 2009) on the discovery of six new genes responsible for the inheritance of heart attacks. This work delivers important insights into the emergence and mechanisms of the disease that will lead to an improved heart attacks risk assessment and pave way for new strategies of pharmacological prevention.

http://www.cardiogenics.eu/web/

Integrated Genomics, Clinical Research and Care in Hypertension
A better prevention of hypertension and its cardiovascular consequences is an essential public health goal in Europe, where cardiovascular diseases are the major cause of mortality and morbidity. The four year Network of Excellence 'InGenious HyperCare' goals are: integrating fragmented experience in the mechanisms of blood pressure control and hypertension development, phenotyping initiation and progression of organ damage and exploring genetics, genomics and proteomics of proneness to hypertension and hypertension-related cardiovascular disease. The intense work has borne important results: a genome wide association study comparing marked hypertensive with fully normotensive subjects is near completion; proteomic methodologies for searching markers of organ damage in the urine of hypertensive patients have been developed; biomarkers of cardiac damage in the plasma of hypertensive patients are being investigated; animal research on models of cardiac and brain damage associated with hypertension is actively progressing. During the first two years of the project 64 peer-reviewed articles were already published.

http://www.hypercare.eu/