Key drug discovery challenges in cardiovascular medicine

Published on March 5, 2014   31 min

A selection of talks on Pharmaceutical Sciences

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0:00
Hello. This is Daniel Swerdlow and Michael Holmes. And welcome to this talk about some of the challenges faced in developing new drugs for the treatment and prevention of cardiovascular disease.
0:15
This talk will concentrate on pharmacological therapy for the principal areas of cardiovascular disease-- coronary heart disease including myocardial infarction and related conditions, stroke and other cerebrovascular disease, and peripheral vascular disease. As the global burden of cardiovascular disease continues to grow and novel therapeutic strategies are relatively scarce, we will address five key challenges faced in finding new approaches to treating and preventing cardiovascular disease. First, the identification of new therapeutic targets beyond those modulated by conventional therapy. Second, we will examine methods for validating potential targets early in drug development process. Safety of new medicines is increasingly important and is subject to growing external regulation. We consider techniques for predicting and evaluating adverse drug effect in order to prevent and reduce patient harm. Fourth, we discuss the use of pharmacogenetics, an expanding approach that uses a patient's genotype to optimize their pharmacological therapy. And finally, we propose a strategy for integrating new techniques into the drug development pipeline in order to expedite the transfer of safe, effective new therapies into clinical practice.
1:28
Our first challenge is the identification of new targets for treating and preventing cardiovascular disease.
1:40
There is currently a large range of pharmaceutical agents used for the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease. There are, however, a relatively limited number of therapeutic targets. Conventional therapy aims to reduce cholesterol, blood pressure, and to some extent inflammation and to inhibit coagulation and thrombosis. It is likely, however, that many more targets and pathological mechanisms lie undiscovered that could be valuable novel targets for the cardiovascular disease prevention. And it is the identification of those targets that is the first challenge we will examine.

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