Why do some people with pulmonary hypertension not respond to drugs?

Molecular phenotyping of pulmonary hypertension

BHF Intermediate Basic Science Research Fellow Dr Christopher Rhodes is looking for ways to treat pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), a serious condition where people have high blood pressure in the arteries of the lungs. Current treatments relieve the symptoms but do not cure the disease, so many still die within a few years of heart failure. In PAH, lung arteries become thicker, and the heart has to work much harder to pump the blood into the lungs. Some treatments are available that make blood vessels relax and stop them growing thicker, but they don’t always work. Researchers believe the disease is different in different people, which might explain why drugs do not work in everyone. Dr Rhodes has identified molecular ‘signatures’ of genes, proteins and metabolites of disease that he believes can predict survival. In this project, he will test if these signatures can be found in patients with pulmonary hypertension before and after they are given drugs, and see if they can reveal why some people respond well to drugs and others don’t. Understanding the disease better could improve the way we diagnose it and select the treatment that is most likely to work for individual patients. It could also reveal clues for new, better drugs and help to predict the outlook for people with PAH.