Cardiac Fibrosis is a hallmark of Heart Failure
Background:
Metabolic/ life style disorders like cardiovascular (CVD) and diabetes have reached an epidemic proportion in developing countries like India. In fact, we are on the brink of an impending catastrophe since the cost of managing such complex disorders is astronomical and is increasingly affecting the working populace who provide the bulwark of our economy. With the estimate to double the number of cases with Cardio-metabolic diseases by 2030, India has the high prevalence in South-Asia region. An overwhelming 2.6 million were predicted to be affected by coronary heart disease, one of the major forms of cardiovascular disorders. Major events such as coronary artery disease could lead to cardiac fibrosis which ultimately culminates to end-stage heart failure. Thus it is pertinent to pursue scientific research to initiate appropriate measures to manage the public health burden, as it poses unsurpassed challenges which are not matched by the budget allocations for health care in India. From dissecting the disease etiology to identifying prognostic markers for better management of the disease is still a challenge for researchers. In the post human genome sequencing era much of the thrust has been focused towards application of advanced genomic tools along with evaluation of traditional risk factors. With the advancement of next generation proteomics and metabolomics approaches it has now become possible to understand the protein-protein interaction networks & metabolic rewiring which lead to the perturbations of the disease phenotype.
Major Interests:
1. Dissecting the key changes in the Cell-ECM interactions during cardiac fibrosis.
2. Mechanistic understanding of cardiac fibrosis.
3. Discovery of new biomarkers for heart failure progression.
Approach:
The development of systems biology based approaches to understand the disease process is fast emerging as the method of choice to delineate the patho-physiology of a disease. With the improvement of “omics” based methods; it is now possible to integrate different layers of information and understand the complex network of the disease process. Application of proteomics has helped in deciphering key differentially expressed proteins, important PTMs, and interactive protein complexes which potentially drives the molecular events during disease progression. On the other hand, the metabolic rewiring of any system probes the key metabolic pathways which are important in the specific perturbed disease phenotype. It is important to generate complementary knowledge of proteomes as well as metabolomes to understand the intricate mechanistic aspect of a disease. Further, from the perspective of biomarker development these layers of information hold immense potential to generate a panel of markers which could eventually gain high predictive accuracy in terms of disease outcome events. A novel multi-marker approach for different forms of CVDs would be of enormous importance and should be tested in Indian population.