Atherothrombosis & Vascular
Head – Karlheinz Peter
Heart attack is a sudden catastrophic event in the lives of many people in our community. The direct cost of coronary heart disease in Australia is the largest of any single cardiovascular condition, at $1.76 billion, or 28.6 per cent, of all costs associated with heart disease. Stroke is the second largest at $1.08 billion, or 16.5 per cent. It is the single most common cause of death in Australia and is most commonly manifest as angina, heart attack or sudden death. For a growing number of elderly Australians, atherosclerosis, the development of plaques, fatty deposits in blood vessel walls, and its complications – such as coronary heart disease and stroke – will be the major health care problem in terms of mortality, reduction in quality of life, and cost to the public health system.
The Atherothrombosis and Vascular laboratory’s research interests adadress these problems in a range of ways: from the investigation of those cells that play an important role in plaque development to the study of nutritional approaches that might prevent atherosclerosis and even the prevention and reversal of cholesterol accumulation in blood vessels.
This laboratory hopes to address these public health concerns from a number of angles, including working towards the design of a new class of “intelligent" drugs. These will prevent clotting, or dissolve clots that have caused a heart attack or stroke without the excessive bleeding complications that are a feature of currently available drugs. The laboratory is also working towards the identification of biomarkers (such as elevated levels of certain proteins in the blood) which, when added to existing knowledge of family history and lifestyle risk, help predict coronary plaque rupture.
The overall aim of prevention and cure of cardiovascular disease is realised by overlapping research that is molecular, cellular, physiological and highly translational – research that has a strong clinical focus.
