Current status of cardiovascular medicine
“The field of cardiovascular medicine today is incredibly exciting,” Wu said, pointing to a number of advances that have greatly improved patient outcomes. “We’ve made breakthroughs in interventional cardiology with stents and cardiac electrophysiology with the development of ultra-miniature pacemakers. We’ve also seen incredible advances in open-chest heart bypass surgery and heart failure medications.”
Among the most promising developments, Wu highlights the impact of new medicines. “If there’s one most recent promising advance, it’s drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic.” The active ingredient in these drugs, semaglutide, mimics the GLP-1 hormone, which is released in response to a meal. This allows patients to feel fuller faster and subsequently lose more weight. “This leads to a significant reduction in mortality from cardiovascular disease,” Wu explains.
The future of heart disease treatment and prevention
In the future, Wu is most excited about the potential for induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to revolutionize heart disease treatment. iPSCs can be generated from a patient’s own cells and have the remarkable ability to differentiate into a wide variety of cells, including cardiac cells, under specific laboratory conditions.
Although heart disease is the number one cause of death in the United States, recent studies have shown that many people are unaware of their risk factors. With improved public education and adopting simple lifestyle changes, risk can be significantly reduced.
iPSCs also offer the enticing possibility of individually treating heart disease without the need for invasive procedures: “iPSCs represent a future where we can predict the best treatment for the heart from a tray of cells, without any incisions or swallowing a pill,” Wu explains.
Typically, to find out whether a new treatment is safe and effective, it must go through rigorous testing, including animal studies and human clinical trials, which can be time-consuming and expensive. But with iPSCs, scientists like Wu can perform these tests in the lab, using cells that function similarly to the human heart. This approach, which Wu calls “clinical trials in a dish,” has the potential to dramatically streamline the development of new treatments by reducing reliance on traditional clinical trials.
Advances in genetic medicine also hold great promise for the field of cardiology. Wu explains that within the next five to 10 years, we will see a future in which gene-editing tools such as CRISPR/Cas9 will be applied to correct mutations that lead to inherited heart diseases, such as familial hypercholesterolemia, increasing the chances of developing heart disease at a younger age.
