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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PRETREAT (PRoteome-based assessment of vascular disease for the Establishment of a Translational REsearch plATform)

Teaser

Summary

Cardiovascular diseases are number one cause of death globally, with mortality rates higher than any other non-communicable disease. Vascular disease affects blood (arteries and veins) and lymph vessels of the circulatory system. Many factors, mostly associated to lifestyle (such as smoking, unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, stress etc) and/or having diabetes, being male and having high cholesterol levels favor the development of vascular disease. An active, healthy lifestyle is thus a first step towards improvement of vascular health.
Specific drugs have been developed to reduce vascular disease if adherence to a healthy lifestyle is low or is without effect. These include antihypertensives (lowering blood pressure drugs); antidyslipidemics (lipid lowering drugs) and antithrombotics (anti blood clotting drugs). However these drugs can be much improved upon and that is where the PRETREAT project comes in:
- PRETREAT aimed the identification of early non-invasive (blood and urine) makers of vascular disease so that intervention can be performed at a much earlier stage and hence be more effective and less aggressive (less side-effects).
- PRETREAT also aimed to better understand vascular disease by studying it on the very detailed (molecular) level using modern tools such as proteomics (analysis of all proteins that are modified in disease) and thereby proposing new drug targets.

Work performed

The PRETREAT project so far has laid the groundwork for the project by collection of human blood samples, the selection of urinary protein-based markers of vascular disease and development of informatics tools to analyse complex molecular data.
However the partners had to reluctantly terminate the PRETREAT project after 15 months mostly due to the complicated funding scheme of the H2020 RISE action.

Final results

Although the project was terminated after 15 months, it has contributed to the transfer of important know-how on animal handling and specialized bioinformatics tools between partners, increasing both the individual knowledge and skills and consequently the home laboratory knowledge on these issues expected to impact its future research activities. In addition, the generated tool for automated ortholog analysis is versatile and as such, expected to be used for assessment of orthology outside the PRETREAT project.