CARDIOVASCULAR GENOMICS (R MCPHERSON, SECTION EDITOR) Towards a Molecular Systems Model of Coronary Artery Disease

# The Author(s) 2014. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract Coronary artery disease (CAD) is a complex disease driven by myriad interactions of genetics and environmental factors. Traditionally, studies have analyzed only 1 disease factor at a time, providing useful but limited understanding of the underlying etiology. Recent advances in cost-effective and high-throughput technologies, such as single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotyping, exome/genome/RNA se-quencing, gene expression microarrays, and metabolomics assays have enabled the collection of millions of data points in many thousands of individuals. In order to make sense of such 'omics ' data, effective analytical methods are needed. We review and highlight some of the main results in this area, focusing on integrative approaches that consider multiple mo-dalities simultaneously. Such analyses have the potential to uncover the genetic basis of CAD, produce genomic risk scores (GRS) for disease prediction, disentangle the complex interactions underlying disease, and predict response to treatment. Keywords Coronary artery disease. Coronary heart disease. Genomics. Systems biology.Mendelian randomization. Metabolites. Network analysis. Molecular systemsmode