Strategies for the treatment of aneurysms are changing. More screening and prevention is recommended and endovascular surgery is gradually taking over from conventional surgery. The immediate validity of this latter approach (a decrease in surgical mortality) has been recently reported. Several partners of the FAD project were amongst the first to develop these new lines of management, including screening programs for prevention and developing new devices for vascular endografting.

The general objective of this part of the project is to develop at a preclinical, and subsequently at a clinical level, original and innovative therapeutic approaches for preventing aneurysmal development and for treating its consequences particularly in the context of endovascular grafting. This will be based on the products of work program: molecular and cellular mechanisms.

Medical prevention of aneurismal progression

The objective is to validate current treatment and develop new therapeutics in human aneurismal diseases

Interventional cell, gene and biomaterial therapy: FAD partners were the first to explore the therapeutic potential of cell seeding in experimental aneurysms. These first and highly innovative studies demonstrated the ability of syngeneic cell therapy to prevent aneurismal progression and rupture at an experimental level. These initial data have been recently extended to cell types other than smooth muscle cells. The purpose of the FAD project is to extend this approach to large animal models, to develop new polymers for in situ cell, gene or protein therapies, and to develop an endovascular procedure for the treatment of experimental saccular aneurysms and endoleaks, which will be subsequently tested in humans. New therapeutic strategy

Depending on the progression of preceding work programs, new molecular targets and new therapeutic strategies for AAA and TAA prevention will be proposed, targeting for example platelet activation, neutrophil accumulation and protease release in AAA, protease retention in areas of mucoid degeneration in TAA, or vortex-induced platelet activation. Such new therapeutic developments could necessitate the opening of the FAD consortium to new partners, in particular European SMEs or Pharmaceutical companies.