Repurposing available anti-inflammatory and immunomodulating agents for cardiovascular risk management: A call for submissions to current clinical pharmacology

Despite significant advances in diagnosis and treatment, atherosclerosis, and its various cardiovascular disease manifestations, remains a common cause of death and disability worldwide [1, 2]. Concerningly, a significant proportion of patients, particularly those with high cardiovascular risk at baseline, suffer from recurrent cardiovascular events despite optimal treatment with established preventive agents such as angioten sin converting enzyme inhibitors, beta-blockers, antiplatelet and lipid lowering agents. This imposes a significant public health and financial burden, and also highlights important gaps in the current therapeutic armamentarium for cardiovascular risk management [3]. Recent evidence supports the concept that high-risk cardiovascular patients suffering from recurrent events are characterized by a particularly high systemic inflammatory burden, estimated using standard biochemical markers [4]. This observation, together with the established role of inflammation in the pathophysiology of atherosclerosis, suggests that pro-inflammatory pathways play a key role in this “residual inflammatory risk”, a type of cardiovascular risk that is not captured using available scoring systems [5]. The current lack of specific anti-inflammatory therapies for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease has prompted the search for new drugs that target traditional and/or novel immune and inflammatory pathways [6, 7].