Target therapy explores treatment with specific therapeutic drugs against pathogenic molecules or cells to ensure normal, healthy tissue is not affected. This allows the possibility of personalised, precise treatment. The most common targeted therapies include treatments such as protein or nucleic acid drugs, gene editing technology and cell therapy. Such targeted therapies can be used to treat cardiovascular diseases, but there are several limitations. For example, despite targeted therapy demonstrating excellent efficacy, they do pose the risk of off-target events or gene mutations. Overall, these therapies hold the potential of very precise personalised treatments, despite the lack of research into the limitations.

This review by Xu M & Song J aimed to compare various targeted therapies, such as monoclonal antibodies, CRISPR, CAR-T therapy and others.

Key learnings:

Further research is needed into fully understanding the limitations of targeted therapy, to allow for the harnessing of precise, individualised therapeutics. These treatments hold great potential in treating cardiovascular diseases, and many others, in the most effective way possible.