ABSTRACT
Atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease remains one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in the USA affecting 22.6% of the population and accounting for over 6 million hospitalizations per year.1 Currently employed treatment strategies include risk factor modification, conventional pharmacotherapy, and percutaneous or surgical revascularization. Yet despite these interventions disease progression often results in recurrent symptoms, with many patients exhausting all therapeutic options. For these patients, recent advances in the understanding of the vascular biology of atherosclerosis have been exploited to design novel molecular and cell-based therapies for the treatment of symptomatic atherosclerotic vascular disease. The application of gene transfer, antisense oligodeoxynucleotide technology, bone marrow-derived cell transplantation, or immunomodulation techniques to the treatment of atherosclerosis has resulted in therapeutic alternatives to restore vessel wall function and interrupt the progression of vascular disease.
