Of mice and men – the future of cardiovascular research in the molecular era

The advent of the molecular age has changed experimental cardiovascular research and continues to make these changes deeper and more and more irreversible by the day. Gradually over the last 12 years dogs and cats, the classical experimental animals in cardiovascular sciences, became unfashionable for a variety of reasons, some of them nonscientific (i.e., new legislation, expense, also to avoid clashes with animal rights activists etc.). They were replaced by rabbits and rats (less expensive, but not necessarily better suited) and, more recently, by transgenic mice. This description of the changing preferences for experimental animals shows that not all of these changes have their roots in the new opportunities of molecular approaches. That was to be expected because not all cardiovascular problems can be reduced to exercises in gene expression. Acute effects and most pharmacological problems are not necessarily solved utilizing the gene approach, although screening for new pharmacological agents uses more and more genetically altered cells and animals. Gene expression studies are most appropriate when studying chronic adaptation of tissues to a change in the environment of cells or organs, like pressure overload, or the growth of new blood vessels or the adaptation to chronic hypoxia, to name only a few. Molecular biology assumes its prominent place today because it promises a paradigm shift in modern medicine, namely that chronic degenerative diseases are amenable to causal treatment and that structural changes can be elicited by substituting failing or weakly expressed genes or by substituting mutated genes with the correct copy. It can be envisaged that atherosclerosis and its organ manifestations will be avoided by gene therapy and that already existing or threatening arterial occlusions can be compensated for by the stimulation of angiogenesis and arteriogenesis. Since these new methods will in all likelihood be less expensive than surgery and …