Identifying exosomal biomarkers to predict cardiac events

Abstract: Every year, millions of people in the world die from cardiovascular diseases. Most of thesevictims show no symptoms of disease for decades as the disease silently progresses, but maysuddenly become afflicted with a myocardial infarction or stroke. At present there is aregrettable lack of important disease markers that could help identify patients at risk withregard to secondary cardiovascular events. Biomarkers for this would of course be extremelyvaluable. If such markers could distinguish between patients with different responses totreatment and overall outcome, that would be of major added value as this potentially couldpave the way for differentiated preventive measures. In this study we show that specificproteins isolated from plasma-derived exosomes are indeed associated with an increased riskfor secondary cardiac events.