The Administrative Department of Science, Technology and Innovation

Cardiovascular and respiratory diseases are the first and third cause of death, respectively. Cardiovascular risk is known to increase in groups with impaired lung function; however, the mechanisms behind this association are not fully understood. The aim of CaReS is to elucidate the shared pathophysiology of impaired lung function and cardiovascular risk, and to investigate the risk factors associated with them.
The CaReS Cohort Study includes adults (18-80 years old) from Cartagena de Indias, a tropical city on Colombian Caribbean Coast, where recent population admixture settled a three-hybrid genetic structure (European, African and Ameridian ancestry). At baseline, the cohort will generate extensive data on -omics (e.g., genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and epigenomics), socio-economic wellbeing, lifestyle, medical history, cardiometabolic, inflammatory and liver function markers, as well as objective measures of ventilatory and cardiovascular performance.
The cohort will collect data every three years, for a total period of ten years. Prospective risk of cardiovascular disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) will be investigated, and their risk factors. Throughout the study period, changes in prevalence, and interactions of various risk factors with these changes will also be ascertained.
A predictive risk score for cardiovascular and chronic respiratory disability will be built, using cross-sectional and longitudinal data.

Around the world, the prevalence of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) has been increasing since the last two decades, with approximately 347 million patients with diabetes by 2013 according to the World Health Organization (WHO). This pronounced increase is due to an increase in the prevalence of obesity, reduction in physical activity levels, accelerated urbanization and aging of the population. In Colombia, T2DM ranks fifth in the main morbidity and mortality causes, including only deaths caused directly and without adding the strong influence that T2DM has on cardiovascular disease mortality.
Insufficient tissue response to normal insulin concentrations, called insulin resistance, is one of the central pathophysiological mechanisms in the development of T2DM. However, there is currently no simple, practical, safe and reproducible method that allows the diagnosis or identification of insulin resistance, nor the follow-up to its evolution. At the moment, the gold standard for assessing the degree of insulin sensitivity or resistance is the "hyperinsulinemic-euglycemic clamp", a laborious technique, of high cost and high technical difficulty, requiring specialized personnel and hospitalization. Non-invasive methods based on mathematical regressions, such as the Homeostatic Model Assessment (HOMA-IR), are imperfect and widely variable, and have not been validated in the Latin American population, less Still Colombian.
Therefore, the development of new, easily obtainable quantitative tools for the diagnosis of insulin resistance is required. This requires not only the identification of new and better biomarkers, but also the determination of their diagnostic performance and operational characteristics.
This project will investigate 3 molecular targets (myokines), novel and easy to measure, with high probability of being good biomarkers of insulin resistance. The research will include validation of its association with insulin resistance measured by the reference method, as well as its measurement in apparently healthy individuals. Finally, operator-receiver characteristics of each test will be analyzed, in order to propose a cutoff point for the diagnosis of insulin resistance.

This is a randomized, double-blind, controlled, which seeks to compare two groups of volunteers (naive and previously exposed to malaria) who were made 3 immunizations with a synthetic derivative of the CS protein of Plasmodium vivax in order to determine their protective efficacy. Then volunteers will be subject to an infectious challenge to assess the infectivity of gametocytes in the blood early stage of P. vivax in Anopheles albimanus mosquitoes.