Using DNA markers to personalise treatment for high blood pressure

Ancestry and biological Informative Markers for stratification of HYpertension: The AIM HY study (Joint funding with MRC)

The BHF is working in partnership with the Medical Research Council and their Stratified Medicine Initiative, which awards funding to scientists to find out why groups of patients with the same diagnosis respond to treatments differently. One of these prestigious grants has been awarded to a research team led by Professor Philip Chowienczyk from King’s College London, to look for new, more personalised treatments for hypertension, or high blood pressure. Hypertension is common and is a major cause of coronary heart disease, kidney disease and stroke. A healthy lifestyle alone is often not enough to bring it under control, and drugs are also needed. Although several effective and safe drugs are available, people often have to try several drugs or consider using a combination. It takes time to get the treatment right, and then it is often not controlled very well by the patient. We know little about why some people respond better to some blood pressure lowering drugs than others – but we know ethnic background could be important. For example, different ethnic groups in the UK, and within Europe, Asia and Africa, respond differently. At the moment, doctors use age and a patient’s self-defined ethnicity to decide which treatment to give, but this approach does not take into account the diverse ethnic backgrounds in the UK. We need new, more accurate, personalised ways to decide what treatments are most likely to work. In this grant, the researchers will investigate if genetic markers of ancestry (which predict the proportion of a person’s ancestors from Europe, Asia and Africa), can be combined with measurements of metabolites (that are created by the chemical reactions happening in cells in each person) circulating in the blood, to predict which drugs are likely to work to treat high blood pressure. They also hope to identify potential genes behind the ‘metabolite signatures’ that predict a particular drug response. Ultimately, they hope a simple blood test could personalise treatment for high blood pressure by dictating the treatment that is given.