Grant: Operating Grant

In Canada, the number of individuals coping with heart disease is steadily increasing and now affects more than 1.3 million individuals. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) represents the most important health care spending in Canada and costs the Canadian economy $20.9 billion/year. Current standard of care requires patients with heart disease to be treated with lipid-lowering medications known as statins. Still, despite being treated with highly potent statins, the risk of cardiovascular events remained very elevated for these patients. We are at the forefront of CVD pharmacogenomic testing and are currently involved in several clinical trials and genetic consortia that aim at developing personalized medical tools to optimize management of CVD in Canada and around the world. Our objective is to take advantage of our increasing knowledge of the human genome along with the most recent technologies used for surveying it to identify genes that influence both the efficacy of these drugs and the risk of CVD in this population. On top of opening novel research opportunities on the newly discovered genes that influence CVD, this project will directly improve personal health by delivering molecular diagnostic tools able to identify patients that are likely to benefit the most from high-dose statin therapy. As a consequence, this approach will help determine whether or not a specific subgroup of patients do not drive any benefits from statin therapy and therefore expose themselves to avoidable potential side-effects in such a way that they are likely to derive more risk than benefits from statin therapy. The identification of better responsive patients could help avoid a considerable amount of useless prescriptions and provide substantial savings for healthcare systems across Canada and around the world.