Proteins floating in our blood can tell us a lot about our health. While genetic testing reveals risks we are born with, proteins provide a real-time look at what’s going on inside the body.
From how we process energy to how diseases like heart problems or diabetes develop, proteins are giving researchers new tools to better understand and treat disease.
A recent study published in the journal Circulation: Genomic and Precision Medicine has shed new light on how certain blood proteins relate to heart disease.
Led by Dr. Kathryn McGurk from the Computational Cardiac Imaging group and the Cardiovascular Genomics Precision Medicine group at the LMS (MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences), the study focused on understanding whether specific proteins in our blood could help doctors predict heart disease and offer more targeted treatments.
The team looked at over 45,000 blood samples from the UK Biobank, a large health research database. They measured levels of nine important proteins known to affect the heart, including ACE2, BNP, NT-proBNP, and troponin I. These proteins help regulate blood pressure, heart stress, and heart damage.
What they found was that protein levels varied depending on a person’s age, sex, lifestyle, medication use, and even ancestry. This shows how personal our biology is, and why a one-size-fits-all approach to treatment might not work.
One protein, in particular, caught the researchers’ attention: ACE2. You might have heard of ACE2 during the COVID-19 pandemic, as it’s the protein the virus uses to enter our cells. But ACE2 also plays an important role in heart health.
It helps relax blood vessels by breaking down a substance called angiotensin II, which normally causes blood vessels to tighten. This relaxing effect can help lower blood pressure.
In people with high blood pressure or type-2 diabetes, ACE2 levels were found to be higher, especially in women. Interestingly, this might not be a bad thing. The researchers suggest that the body is increasing ACE2 levels as a way to fight back against high blood pressure and diabetes. It could be the body’s natural way of trying to heal and protect itself.
This finding could change how we think about blood pressure and diabetes treatment. Many people take medications called ACE inhibitors to treat high blood pressure. These drugs work by blocking a different protein, called ACE1, which creates the substance that tightens blood vessels.
Since ACE2 does the opposite—helping to relax vessels—the balance between ACE1 and ACE2 might be important. Some people might respond better to certain drugs depending on how much ACE2 they naturally have in their blood.
Even more interesting is the possibility of using ACE2 directly as a treatment. Some early studies in animals suggest that metformin, a common diabetes drug, may increase ACE2 levels. If future research proves this works in people, it could lead to new treatments for both blood pressure and diabetes—possibly with fewer side effects.
Dr. McGurk says this research highlights how modern data science can help find new disease markers and better treatment strategies.
It also shows how teams from different fields—doctors, data scientists, and biologists—must work together to make progress. She credits a team of early-career researchers, senior advisors, and clinical experts for helping to make these discoveries.
This research was funded by several important organizations, including the British Heart Foundation, the Medical Research Council, and the National Institute for Health Research. Dr. McGurk is a British Heart Foundation Immediate Research Fellow at Imperial College London.
Overall, this study helps us understand that proteins like ACE2 could be the key to more personalized and effective treatments for common health conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes. By studying what’s happening in the blood in real time, scientists are moving closer to treatments that are tailored to each person’s unique biology.
If you care about blood pressure, please read studies about unhealthy habits that could increase high blood pressure risk, and eating eggs in a healthy diet may reduce risks of diabetes, high blood pressure.
For more information about blood pressure, please see recent studies that early time-restricted eating could help improve blood pressure, and results showing 12 foods that lower blood pressure.
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