Our new preprint on the AtherOMICS protocol and pilot data
π£ Today we present the protocol and pilot data from AtherOMICS β a biobanking project built in our lab over the past 3 years aiming to provide access to multi-omics/multi-modal data from human atherosclerotic tissue.
Omics technologies offer unprecedented throughput and opportunities for studying disease biology at scale. As highlighted in oncology, multi-omics analyses of human disease tissue can unlock major insights into novel drug targets and precision medicine approaches.
Even though atherosclerosis underlies the most common causes of death worldwide, we still lack large multimodal datasets of human disease tissue.
AtherOMICS recruits patients undergoing carotid or femoral atherosclerosis and involves the collection of:
π atherosclerotic plaque tissue
π pre-surgery peripheral blood samples
π clinical data
π in vivo plaque imaging
Some innovations of AtherOMICS:
With a median of 40 minutes from surgery to freezing and systematic collection of multiple segments per plaque, our protocol is optimized for omics analyses of human atherosclerotic plaques.
On top of plaque tissue, we collect peripheral blood (serum/plasma/DNA/PBMCs) from every patient shortly before the surgery, allowing for correlations between plaque biology and potential circulating biomarkers.
We systematically characterize each plaque with histology (H&E and IHC) with images stored and scanned in high quality, offering potential for digital pathology solutions.
We integrate all these data with pre-surgery in vivo and post-surgery ex vivo imaging, aiming for the development of imaging biomarkers of plaque vulnerability.
This is a collaborative effort with Nikolaos Tsilimparis, MD, PhD, FEBVS (vascular surgery) and the neurology departments of our hospital and involved multiple members of our lab (coordinated by Luka Ε½ivkoviΔ), who have set up patient screening, recruitment, and experimental protocols.
