The Grand Challenges in Cardiovascular Drug Delivery

Despite the ongoing development in invasive cardiovascular interventions and pharmacological therapies over the past 25 years, cardiovascular diseases (CVD) continue to account for 31% of all deaths worldwide. This amounts to 17.9 million deaths per year, a number that is expected to grow to more than 23.6 million by 2030, according to WHO estimates. According to the European Cardiovascular Disease Statistics 2017 (Wilkins et al., 2017), CVD caused 3.9 million deaths in Europe alone. As reported by the 2019 Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics of the American Heart Association (Benjamin et al., 2019), every 40 s, an American will suffer from a myocardial infarction (MI).