Calcific aortic valve disease: Shedding light on its onset

Calcific aortic valve disease (CAVD) is the most common valve disease in the Western world. There is no therapeutic medication that could prevent or halt the progression of disease. As such, surgical or thranscatheter valve replacement remain the only treatment options to date. Considering that the burden of this disease is expected to triple in the next decades, improved understanding of CAVD and in particular its onset is warranted. The objective of this thesis was to address this challenge and use new means of elucidating mechanisms of early CAVD. First, we have used molecular imaging to visualize disease progression in vivo and identified important hallmarks for disease propagation. Second, we have developed a tissue engineered three-dimensional in vitro valve-like model of CAVD and used it to study the onset and progression of CAVD as it may occur in humans. We believe that results of this work may aid in the development of targets for therapeutic strategies that can possibly prevent, diagnose, or treat CAVD, broaden our data to other disease processes and further the progress in engineering valve substitutes.