Cardiometabolic biomarker research in Latvia: From laboratory to clinics and back

Some difficult questions, like, why not all patients respond to therapy, and how their diet, food supplements, and lifestyle affect the drug response can be answered by measuring biomarkers – quantitative indicators of the severity of a disease and the efficiency of a treatment or intervention. For decades, patients are directed to testing laboratories where their samples are analysed to support diagnosis. Nowadays biomarker analysis plays an important role also in all phases of drug discovery, development, and clinical use. Inclusion of biomarker testing in drug development can improve the success rates threefold, thus speeding up the path of new therapies to clinical applications. Benefits of using a biomarker-driven approach include early go/nogo decisions in proof-of-concept studies and early assessment of drug efficacy before reaching lengthy clinical endpoints. In addition, biomarker measurements can help to stratify patient populations thus advancing precision medicine approaches. This is very important in such noncommunicable diseases as diabetes, obesity, and heart failure – collectively called cardiometabolic diseases which are widespread in Latvia and worldwide. The Latvian Institute of Organic Synthesis (LIOS), the leading drug discovery and development centre in the Baltic, specialises in fundamental and applied research in organic chemistry, pharmaceutical biosciences, and molecular biology. Its advanced research infrastructure comprises also a wide range of bioanalytical equipment that can be used to detect small-molecular biomarkers in biological samples emerging from preclinical drug discovery and drug target evaluation studies, as well as clinical research projects. Researchers from LIOS, Riga Stradiņš University, Riga Eastern Clinical University Hospital, and Pauls Stradiņš Clinical University Hospital have identified several cardiometabolic disease biomarkers that are used to identify novel compounds that might be used as treatments for cardiometabolic diseases, as well as follow dietary interventions that are suggested to improve cardiometabolic health.