- Predicting cardiovascular risk is important for clinicians providing patient care and for scientists developing new drugs.
- Scientists can use biomarker surrogates as signs that cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk may increase or decrease.
- In the new study, scientists have developed a blood test that offers an accurate and personalized prediction of CVD.
In a new study, scientists have reported findings that show a blood test can be used to predict CVD.
The study, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, opens the door to more individualized treatment plans for CVD. It may also improve the speed at which new CVD drugs can be identified and developed.
When a new drug is developed, scientists have to make sure that it is both effective and safe. This is a rigorous process that can often take many years. While important, this significantly slows down the speed at which new drugs can be developed, and also increases the costs.
One way of increasing the speed and reducing the cost of drug development without sacrificing efficacy or safety is to use a surrogate biomarker as a predictor of risk.
Finding a surrogate that can accurately predict the risk of certain diseases can also benefit patients directly. If a clinician can measure a reliable surrogate they can potentially prevent a disease before it has developed, reducing the risks to the patient.
Medical News Today spoke with Dr. Stephen Williams — Chief Medical Officer at SomaLogic, and the corresponding author of the present study — who stressed the importance of surrogates, particularly for CVD risk.
“For situations where clinical cardiovascular outcomes studies are required today, a surrogate enables unsafe or ineffective candidate drugs to be terminated early and cheaply and supports the acceleration of safe and effective drugs. Participants in the trials do not have to have events or die in order to contribute to the signal.”
“In personalized medicine, a surrogate enables cost-effective allocation of treatments to the people who need them the most, and potentially increases the uptake of newer more effective drugs so that outcomes are improved,” said Dr. Williams.
“Surrogates are highly valuable, but they also have high consequences for errors — for example, the approval of an unsafe or ineffective drug. The weight of evidence needed is therefore very high, in order to have confidence that their value in patient care exceeds the potential consequence for errors.”
Dr. Williams highlighted that a surrogate needs to be able to do three things: first, accurately predict likely clinical outcomes; second, be able to change as potential risks change; and third, work no matter what the driver of risk was.