A team of Australian drug researchers from the University of Sydney, Monash University and La Trobe University have led a global call to action to accelerate new approaches for cardiovascular disease (CVD) drug solutions.

Professor Gemma Figtree from the University of Sydney, Professor Rebecca Ritchie from the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (MIPS) and La Trobe University's Professor Grant Drummond who leads the La Trobe Centre for Cardiovascular Biology and Disease Research, have led the call to action through their shared affiliation with the Australian Cardiovascular Alliance (ACvA) - Australia’s peak leadership body for the advancement of heart, stroke and vascular disease research. 

The authors have outlined the most urgent challenges and potential solutions for accelerating drug discovery and translation in the cardiovascular space, along with the next steps required to drive global collaboration to tackle CVD drug solutions.

The international roundtable identified a number of priority areas across how patients are classified beyond the traditional risk factors such as high blood pressure and cholesterol, smoking, lack of physical activity, obesity and comorbidities such as diabetes, for cardiovascular disease. Using this as a platform to discover new biological mechanisms that cause diseases such as heart attack and heart failure and hinder recovery and quality of life, the authors recommend then targeting these mechanisms to develop precision (personalised) medicine for affected patients.

“The plan is to establish collaborative preclinical and clinical trial networks to enable faster development of new treatments for cardiovascular disease. Together, the international team is now working on progressing these priority areas, engaging with industry, regulatory bodies, governments and the community on a global scale,” said Professor Ritchie.