Coronary Plaque Sampling Reveals Molecular Insights into Coronary Artery Disease
We developed a coronary plaque sampling approach that could be applied broadly in live patients with coronary artery disease (CAD) to obtain molecular and cellular insights into human coronary atherosclerosis.  Our approach combined RNA retrieval directly from balloons used in percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI) and inexpensive, low-input RNA-Seq using SMART-seq. We generated SMART-Seq libraries from coronary samples from 27 patients. Of the 27 patients, 13 were confirmed to have stable CAD (sCAD) and 14 confirmed to have been performed on lesions causing acute coronary syndrome (ACS). We applied CIBERSORTx to analyze the SMART-seq data from each of the 27 samples. We found fibroblasts and fibromyoctes were enriched, while smooth muscle cells were reduced, in samples from ACS compared with sCAD patients. We identified 371 genes as significantly differential expressed (q<0.05) between sCAD and ACS patients. Overall design: Total RNA were extracted directly from human coronary plaques in live patients.  RNA profiles were compared betweeen 13 sCAD patients and 14 ACS patients.