About
Coronary artery disease (CAD) is contraction of coronary artery. Major blood vessels that supply the blood, oxygen and other nutrients to the heart get damaged because of the plaque formation in coronary artery, results in CAD. One of the most difficult problems is to identify the essential mechanism in CAD. According to the World Health Organization, 17.3 million people died due to cardiovascular diseases (CVD) in 2008. Furthermore, it is predicted that by 2030, 23.3 million people will die annually due to CVD. Of the different types of CVDs, the majority of deaths are attributed to CAD or coronary heart disease (CHD). The risks of developing a CAD are linked to a variety of physiological, environmental, and life-style factors, such as age, gender, high blood pressure, hyperlipidemia, diabetes mellitus, tobacco smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, family history, obesity and lack of physical activity. However, studies have shown that approximately half of all coronary deaths are not preceded by cardiac symptoms or diagnoses; thus, precise tools, including biomarkers, are needed to diagnose diseases and assess their progression as early as possible in the pathogenic process. The understanding of how biological molecules vary during the pathogenesis of a disease can have useful applications in the development of new diagnostic tools. One major hurdle in the improvement of diagnosis and treatment for CVDs is the lack of integration of knowledge from different areas of life sciences research.
The effective development and validation of new biomarkers requires access to a wide panel of information, from response to drugs, environmental conditions, genetic factors, and clinical readouts. This information is currently dispersed across different sources, and most of it is only available in publications that are not amenable to the bioinformatics analyses. Integration of these systems-based approaches research for information on complex regulatory and metabolic networks at a single platform can give new opportunity in cardiovascular research.
Integrated Cardiome (In-Cardiome) is a comprahensive knowledgbase for CAD which combines all the required information for disease such as Clnical, Therapies, Drug targets, Pathways, Phenotypes, Gene location and it's functions, SNPs and Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI).