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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2015 Aug 5.
Published in final edited form as: Curr Vasc Pharmacol. 2015;13(4):433–440. doi: 10.2174/1570161112666141014144829

Figure 4. Phenomics approach to the definition of clinical phenome of vascular disease and the identification of multiple drug targets suitable for personalized therapy.

Figure 4

Hypertensive phenotypes will be systematically-integrated and defined as a new hypertensive phenome of vascular disease according to the association with other related (clustered) clinical phenotypes such as vascular dysfunction, vascular inflammation, lipid metabolism, diabetes, and/or kidney dysfunction, multiple disease genes, SNPs, or proteins identified under the scope of the whole genome/proteome/metabolome, using either the top-down (comparative genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, GWAS, etc.) or bottom-up (functional genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, PheWAS, etc.) or both strategies. In the traditional Chinese medicine (TMC), the symptoms of “hypertension” were included in different “Zheng-Hou” defined as “liver-yang hyperactivity (or Gang-Yang-Shang-Kang)”, “liver-qi stagnancy (or Gang-Qi-Yu-Jie)”, “Ying-deficiency with Yang-Hyperactivity (or Yin-Xu-Yang-Sheng)”, or “Abundant Phlegm-dampness (or Tan-Shi-Yong-Sheng)” [33]. Therefore, the hypertensive phenome will now include not only clinical symptoms and signs of elevated blood pressure (hypertension) but also a series of other systematically-defined phenotypic characteristics at different levels, including vascular morphology and function, heart-kidney-neural circuits/networks, metabolites, proteins, and genes. The phenomics approach will also provide a novel paradigm for drug research and development with the identification of multiple targets corresponding to the disease genes and proteins in the disease phenome, which will be suitable for personalized combination therapy.