Coronary Artery Disease

Coronary artery disease (CAD) remains the leading cause of death in the developed world and its impact is increasing on developing countries. CAD is mainly caused by atherosclerosis. Cholesterol build up creates plaques that block blood flow through the coronary arteries. Patients may have varying degrees of chest pain (angina) and shortness of breath while walking or climbing stairs. Others may have no symptoms until the rupture of plaque with superimposed thrombosis (clot formation) leads to a heart attack (myocardial infarction or MI).

The advent of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), pioneered by Dr. Andreas Gruentzig in 1977, has revolutionized the treatment of CAD. Acute MI (heart attacks) can now be treated literally within minutes as the blood supply is restored to the heart muscle. Treatment in appropriate patients with stable disease can relieve the symptoms of angina.

In the past quarter century, the field of interventional cardiology has matured with many options available to patients: balloon angioplasty, bare-metal stents, drug-eluting stents that prevent re-narrowing, and most recently - fully resorbable scaffolds.

CRF has been a leader in this field, designing and implementing the pivotal trials that have led to approval of various coronary devices. We have also, along with colleagues at other research organizations, defined the endpoints to assess the efficacy of these devices. Adjunctive interventional pharmacology to make these procedures safer has also been a key area of research. The CRF Publications Office facilitates, expedites, coordinates, and executes the academic publications process that has led to over 450 abstracts being presented, many of them late-breaking main arena presentations at leading scientific meetings, as well as over 300 manuscripts published since 2007 from important clinical trials such as ACUITY, HORIZONS-AMI, INFUSE-AMI, ADAPT-DES, and TRYTON.

Relevant CTC Service Areas for Coronary Artery Disease

• Trial Design
• Protocol Development
• Data Management
• Statistics And Programming
• Angiographic Core Lab
• IVUS Core Lab
• OCT Core Lab
• CEC
• DSMB
• Medical Writing
• Extended Database Management and Analysis

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