Article preview from Start-Up - November, 2011
Cambridge, UK-based PlaqueTec Ltd. is developing a coronary artery blood sampling technology combined with biomarker analysis to map the biological processes associated with the development and rupture of vulnerable plaque. The ambitious young company plans to use this information to detect and monitor plaque biomarkers, and then use these patented data to help identify drug candidates for atherosclerosis.
Article preview from Start-Up - November, 2011
Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the single largest killer of both men and women in the US and worldwide. Approximately 14 million Americans have CAD, and each year 1.5 million experience and 500,000 die from acute myocardial infarction (AMI), the most deadly presentation of CAD. Additionally, despite major advances in cardiac care, approximately 325,000 people a year in the US die of sudden cardiac death (SCD) – more deaths than from lung and breast cancer combined. Of these SCDs, more than 80% are caused by CAD that was completely unrecognized prior to the fatal AMI. According to the American Heart Association, half of healthy 40-year-old males in the US will eventually develop CAD, and one in three healthy 40-year-old women, with obesity and aging contributing to the future burden of this disease.
There is an immense need for better technology to assess the many factors leading to CAD and SCD, and to predict who is most susceptible. The role of vulnerable plaque in the coronary arteries has been an area of intense clinical study over the past decade, but currently there is no way to identify a culprit lesion before it ruptures and causes a heart attack or stroke. Vulnerable plaques don't usually produce much arterial stenosis, and therefore are not detected by traditional diagnostic technologies such as cardiac stress tests or angiography. Widely used peripheral blood lipid measurement also does not directly assess acute ischemic potential in the arterial wall.
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