Biomedical Research Foundation Academy Of AthensAcademy Of Athens
News :BRFAA coordinates 8M Euro FP7 Program

Dr Evangelos Andreakos from the Center for Immunology and Transplantation of BRFAA coordinates RISKYCAD, an 8M Euro research programme funded from the 7th Framework Programme of Research & Development of the European Union. The programme, ranked among the top 10% of all proposals submitted for the FP7-Health-2012-Innovation Call, brings together 6 research institutions, 4 biotechnology companies and 1 industrial partner from Greece, Germany, United Kingdom, Switzerland, France, Finland and Italy with the aim to develop new personalized diagnostics and treatments for high risk coronary artery disease (CAD)  patients.

Although CAD and acute myocardial infarction constitute the major cause of death in the developed world, risk stratification for CAD with current diagnostic tools is not properly supporting clinical decision making. For example, the Framingham Risk Score that enjoys widespread use adequately predicts the absolute risk for future events in the very extremes of the risk distribution but fails to diagnose the largest proportion of patients that will suffer from cardiovascular events and that apparently come from the groups classified as of low to intermediate risk. This hampers the application of prevention therapies and the development of new therapeutics for the effective control of this disease.

RISKYCAD will now take advantage of the latest technologies to look into new biomarkers for asymptomatic patients in high risk of CAD using some of the finest European cohorts of CAD patients, identify new molecules and develop new diagnostic kits that will be further validated in additional cohorts. Reprogrammed iPS cell based human models will be generated for the study of metabolic aberrations in selected individual vulnerable CAD patients. Defects, e.g. in liver lipid metabolism or regulation of inflammation, will be identified in high risk CAD patients and targeted treatments tested in traditional and new preclinical animal models to provide proof-of-concept level evidence . As RISKYCAD’s approach is based on well characterized patients and phenotypes, clinically applicable stratification methods will be generated that will allow targeted treatment and patient enrichment for clinical trials. Unique predictive modelling and link identification platforms including Drug Repositioning will be used to select drugs or drug combinations that will best match the patient’s biomarker profile. The final (translational) outcomes of this project will be: (i) a set of distinct biomarker test(s) for asymptomatic patients in high risk of CAD that can be ordered both by primary care physicians and specialized cardiologists from routine clinical laboratories; (ii) new CAD risk estimation models; (iii) a set of repositioned drugs ready to be exploited further for the optimal treatment of patients in high risk of CAD.

RISKYCAD aims at developing novel diagnostic tools and treatments to enhance
personalized medicine of high risk coronary artery disease (CAD) patients.


More information: Evangelos Andreakos (vandreakos@bioacademy.gr)