AI to help find new heart drugs

As part of the new collaboration, researchers will draw on data from UK Biobank, a national health resource containing a wealth of information on 500,000 people in the UK. The data available will enable researchers to discover pathways involved in heart disease that could provide new targets for treatment.

  Why We Should Test Heart Drugs On a ‘Virtual Human’ Instead of Animals

Thousands of animals are used for heart drug tests each year—but research shows that computer-simulated trials are more accurate.

The Biggest ‘Drug’ to Reverse or Prevent Heart Disease Isn’t a Medication

The current way doctors treat heart disease is misguided because they treat the risk factors not the causes. To think we can treat heart disease by lowering cholesterol, lowering blood pressure and lowering blood sugar with medication is like mopping up the floor while the sink overflows.

3D Heart Simulation Predicts How Drugs Will Affect Your Heartbeat

Your heart might “skip a beat” if you’re frightened or you suddenly see a long-lost love, but in real life, an irregular heartbeat can be dangerous. If the heart can't pump enough blood to the body, it could result in organ failure or stroke. And certain prescription drugs may throw off the natural rhythm of your heart if not properly vetted.

Can This Drug Cure Performance Anxiety?

Beta-blockers, used primarily as a treatment for heart disease, may help calm the nerves of anxious orators.

Cardiologists Worry As Heart Drug Research Loses Steam

The hunt for new heart drugs is losing momentum as resources are switched to other areas, notably cancer research, where investors get a better bang for their buck.

Gender differences in the effects of cardiovascular drugs

This review briefly summarizes gender differences in the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of cardiovascular drugs and provides recommendations to close the gaps in our understanding of sex-specific differences in drug efficacy and safety.

Heart Drugs: Too Many Medication Types Are Compromising Health, Doctors Say

Many drugs are prescribed widely, even though evidence they actually work is weak...

It's Not Dementia, It's Your Heart Medication: Cholesterol Drugs and Memory

Why cholesterol drugs might affect memory.

These Beating Mini-Hearts Could Save Big Bucks—And Maybe Lives

Pharmaceutical firms typically spend billions of dollars and a decade to successfully bring a new medicine to market. Drugs are often felled by harmful side effects that don’t get detected until costly human trials—and the heart is the number one place where things can go wrong. So drugmakers have been looking for ways to identify cardiac issues sooner rather than later.

Tomorrow’s Heart Drugs Might Target Gut Microbes

If your cholesterol levels are high, your doctor might prescribe you a statin, a drug that blocks one of the enzymes involved in creating cholesterol. But in the future, she might also prescribe a second drug that technically doesn’t target your body at all. Instead, it would manipulate the microbes in your gut.

Viagra’s famously surprising origin story is actually a pretty common way to find new drugs

Despite the drug’s popularity today, the researchers who discovered it weren’t even looking for it. Sildenafil, the active ingredient in Viagra, was originally developed to treat cardiovascular problems. It was meant to dilate the heart’s blood vessels by blocking a particular protein called PDE-5. In animal tests, it seemed to work moderately well: researchers could find evidence that it was impeding PDE-5, and the animals weren’t having any obvious negative side effects.