Precision medicine in pulmonary hypertension: how close are we today?

Abstract

Purpose of review: Pulmonary hypertension (PH) is a specific but heterogeneous disease defined foremost by elevated pulmonary artery pressure, typically occurring due to pulmonary vascular fibroproliferative, plexigenic, or thrombotic remodelling. The heterogenous clinical and pathobiological basis of PH poses challenges and opportunities for optimizing treatment alignment to individual patients.

Recent findings: Advancing precision medicine through personalized treatment pathways in PH is particularly timely owing to persistent morbidity and shortened lifespan reported for patients despite an expanding armamentarium of pharmacotherapeutics, particularly for pulmonary arterial hypertension. Accomplishing this goal successfully has benefited from efforts that optimize clinical phenotyping, establishing reticulotypes that represent the phenotypic consequences of functionally essential pathogenic molecular events, and build greater insight on treatment response variability observed in randomized clinical trials.

Summary: Although as a scientific field PH remains early in the precision medicine journey, wider availability and lower cost of high throughput -omics platforms, and increasingly sophisticated analytical methodologies introduces optimism that clinically actionable strategies that improve patient-treatment alignment can be realized in the near-term.