Integrative Bioinformatics Approaches for Identification of Drug Targets in Hypertension

Abstract

High blood pressure or hypertension is an established risk factor for a myriad of cardiovascular diseases. Genome-wide association studies have successfully found over nine hundred loci that contribute to blood pressure. However, the mechanisms through which these loci contribute to disease are still relatively undetermined as less than 10% of hypertension-associated variants are located in coding regions. Phenotypic cell-type specificity analyses and expression quantitative trait loci show predominant vascular and cardiac tissue involvement for blood pressure-associated variants. Maps of chromosomal conformation and expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) in critical tissues identified 2,424 genes interacting with blood pressure-associated loci, of which 517 are druggable. Integrating genome, regulome and transcriptome information in relevant cell-types could help to functionally annotate blood pressure associated loci and identify drug targets.