Approach Overview
What if we could identify when a patient deviates from wellness and begins to chart down the path towards disease? What if we could then treat that patient, intervening and delaying or even halting the disease’s progression?
One of the core tenets of OBI’s mission is to identify CHD far before it escalates to a life-threatening event. Current methods fall short in accurately characterizing this transition.
Existing CHD risk calculators underestimate disease incidence in young adults, and modification of several of the components of these risk scores, such as blood glucose and HDL-cholesterol, have seemingly no effect on CHD outcomes. Since many of the fundamental biological processes that predispose to CHD disease manifest themselves in all tissues, we are optimistic that deep, quantitative assessment of circulating cell phenotypes will be informative in identifying early departures from wellness.
Our research is focused on identifying molecular and cellular abnormalities that characterize the earliest departure from wellness and predispose to coronary heart disease. Our goal is to develop scalable, low-cost assays that could be used for serial monitoring to motivate initiation and intensification of therapy at an individual level. These assays/measurements could then be deployed to the primary care setting, where these patients are most likely to be encountered, identified, and treated.