Major cardiovascular diseases are often accompanied by calcification of arteries and valves. A recent study has revealed a key regulator in the vascular calcification process – the protein sortilin – and the new findings may aid in discovering suitable therapies for vascular calcification (1).

“There are no available therapeutic options to prevent or treat calcification in blood vessels and heart valves, so the motivation of our research was to discover therapeutic strategies,” says Elena Aikawa, principle investigator, and Director of the Vascular Biology Program at the Center of Interdisciplinary Cardiovascular Sciences at Brigham and Women's Hospital. “We used novel mass spectrometry techniques to study sortilin modifications and identified a phosphorylation site that is essential for the calcification process,” says first author Claudia Goettsch, a scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Sortilin regulates the loading of a key calcification enzyme into extracellular vesicles.