LAUSR

Pulmonary vascular disease is a broad category of disorders threatening millions of people in the world, often leading to abnormal blood flow between the lungs and heart. Despite multiple drugs interfering with prostacyclin, endothelin, nitric oxide pathways were available for pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) over the past 15 years, it still remained severe and complicated clinical situation (Humbert et al., 2019). The new prevention and treatment strategies for PAH are a major clinical issue as well as a scientific challenge that needed to be addressed urgently. Discovery in pathobiological and cellular mechanisms of pulmonary vascular remodeling will promote the progression of PAH. We organized the Research Topic entitled “Drug Development and Target Discovery in Pulmonary Vascular Diseases” to discuss and explore new therapeutic targets and mechanism of drug action toward pulmonary vascular disease. The topic covers both basic scientific as well as clinical aspects, consisting 4 original research articles and 1 abstract. Our Research Topic has been well received by the readership of the journal with over 5,000 views and more than 1,000 article downloads. The feature of PAH is involved in the reduction of prostacyclin synthase expression and disorder of prostacyclin metabolic pathway. The clinical uses of prostacyclin analogues mimic endogenous prostacyclin, which lead to vasodilation and improvement of vascular remodeling (Galiè et al., 2003; Galiè et al., 2016). As a member of the prostacyclin family, iloprost was used for severe PAH and acute right ventricular (RV) failure. The importance for RV physiological changes during acute iloprost inhalation is discussed in the paper of Li et al. By cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging, authors showed that acute iloprost inhalation increased RV ejection fraction and RV stroke volume, as well as decreased RV volume in idiopathic PAH and connective tissues disease associated PAH. These observations suggested RV function improvement would be largely attribute to a reduction of afterload by iloprost. This knowledge further added the clinical pharmacological value of iloprost for treatment of PAH. As a mainstay of contemporary treatment, prostacyclin analogues therapies have been recommended to improve heamodynamics and outcomes in short term trials. (Barst et al., 1996). Beraprost is another chemically stable and orally active prostacyclin analogue. However, their present action mechanisms do not explain the relationship between their receptor subtype and ion