Cardiovascular disease is a broad class of disorders of the heart and blood vessels, primarily manifesting in the forms of coronary and peripheral artery disease and stroke. The underlying causes of cardiovascular disease are complex and difficult to treat, and include atherosclerosis (“hardening” of the arteries), hypertension (high blood pressure), obesity and age-related vascular changes as well as genetic and environmental factors.
The costs of cardiovascular disease measured by human lives and economic impacts are staggering. As the leading cause of death worldwide, the WHO estimates that by 2015 cardiovascular disease will claim nearly 20 million lives annually. Over a third of the adult U.S. population suffers from at least one form of cardiovascular disease, resulting in a large and growing economic burden. According to the CDC, in 2010 the total annual cost of treating cardiovascular disease in the U.S. was $444 billion, exceeding the total cost of cancer ($264 billion) and representing nearly 17% of total health care expenditures.
Despite the urgent need for new drugs, the complex, multifactorial nature of cardiovascular disease has posed significant challenges for traditional “single target-single mechanism” drug development approaches targeting receptors, ion channels or enzymes. Recent discoveries uncovering the roles of microRNAs as modulators and markers of cardiovascular disease have offered unanticipated insights into pathogenic mechanisms and have opened the way to fundamentally new therapeutic strategies for the treatment of these intractable and deadly diseases.