A Review of Transcriptome Analysis in Pulmonary Vascular Diseases

Transcriptome analysis is a powerful tool in the study of pulmonary vascular disease and pulmonary hypertension. Pulmonary hypertension is a disease process that consists of several unique pathologies sharing a common clinical definition, that of elevated pressure within the pulmonary circulation. As such, it has become increasingly important to identify both similarities and differences among the different classes of pulmonary hypertension. Transcriptome analysis has been an invaluable tool both in the basic science research on animal models as well as clinical research among the various different groups of pulmonary hypertension. This work has identified new potential candidate genes, implicated numerous biochemical and molecular pathways in diseased onset and progression, developed gene signatures to appropriately classify types of pulmonary hypertension and severity of illness, and identified novel gene mutations leading to hereditary forms of the disease.