[Proteomics and cardiovascular disease]

The description of the human genome has opened new venues for the study and understanding of pathophysiological phenomena. In the 20th century, individual cell components were studied. The 21st century began with a global analysis of cell components. Thanks to the development of new technologies such as DNA chips, or two-dimensional electrophoresis, we can now study the expression of thousands of genes, or the proteins they encode, in a few hours. Genomics has opened the way for proteomics. Improved knowledge of genes does not provide information about cell functions, because any cell expresses all genes simultaneously. Instead, there is selective gene expression depending on the cell type and the stimuli to which it is exposed. The result of this is the proteome, an ensemble of proteins that are responsible for cell functions at any given moment, which are the object of the study of proteomics. The description of the proteome of cardiac cells has begun and some new proteins have been found to be dysregulated in different cardiomyopathies. These proteins are involved either in energy production or in the stress response, or belong to the cell proteasome or cytoskeleton. They may be potential risk markers or new therapeutic targets in the future. In this sense, chemogenomics is a new methodology for the development of new drugs using genomic and proteomic data.