ARTICLE SUMMARY:
The AAC just issued a scientific consensus statement on the link between inflammation and coronary artery disease and the importance of risk assessments based on that clinically actionable biomarker. Caristo Diagnostics is already on it, with an AI platform that can identify inflamed vessels from conventional CCTA scans.
Caristo Diagnostics (Stamford, CT, and Oxford, UK) was spun out of Oxford University in 2018, following a decade of research by its founding team on identifying high-risk cardiac diseases at the earliest possible stage. Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer Charalambos Antoniades, MD, PhD, a professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Oxford, led this work, along with his fellow Oxford professors (and co-founders) Keith Channon, MD, Stefan Neubauer, MD, and Cheerag Shirodaria, MD.
Antoniades and his team have long investigated how a skewed distribution of harmful and protective molecules in the heart, blood vessels, and the fat surrounding them drive atherosclerotic damage. “We were trying to understand how the vessels communicate with the surrounding fat, hypothesizing that fat affects vessel health,” he explains. Their breakthrough discovery—“which completely changed conventional thinking”—was that inflamed vessels secrete molecules that trigger changes in the adjacent fat. “If we could take a biopsy from that fat, we could assess the degree of vascular inflammation.”
