TAXINOMISIS – March 2019

Carotid artery disease constitutes the primary cause of ischaemic cerebrovascular events and accounts for an estimated 150,000 deaths per year from stroke in Europe and 130,000 in the USA, and an even higher burden in morbidity and healthcare costs, due to long-term disability.

The overall purpose of TAXINOMISIS is to provide novel disease mechanism-based stratification for carotid artery disease patients to address the need for stratified and personalised therapeutic interventions in the current era. TAXINOMISIS aims to develop a rational new approach for the stratification of carotid artery disease patients by unwinding the pathobiology that underlies symptomatic plaques, discriminating distinct disease mechanism-driven states (endotypes) and biomarkers, and develop a multiscale risk stratification model. The model will integrate clinical and personalized data, plaque and cerebral image processing and haemodynamics, with computer models and simulations for plaque growth, risk for rupture or erosion and novel biomarkers for high vs low risk states and will be validated in a prospective clinical study.