Unraveling new therapeutic targets of coronary artery disease by genetic approaches.

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the most common cause of death and physical disabilities in developed countries, even though efforts to identify and target causal factors such as hypertension and dyslipidemia have brought tremendous improvements in prevention and treatment. A rapid advance in technology has unraveled new genetic variants associated with CAD and also provided great opportunities to identify novel pathogenic mechanisms and to develop new drugs with higher specificity. Whole-genome sequencing and whole-exome sequencing has made it possible to find rare alleles that are responsible for CAD in small, affected families and case-control studies in a very efficient manner. At present, genome-wide association studies have identified more than 50 loci that explain approximately 10% of the heritability of CAD, most of which is unrelated to traditional risk factors. Mendelian randomization studies enable identification of causal factors among numerous biomarkers and to narrow down promising therapeutic targets. This review highlights new genetic approaches and demonstrates the extent to which the outcome contributes to the finding of new therapeutic targets.