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SFB 1525:  Cardio-Immune Interfaces

Subject Area Medicine
Biology
Term since 2022
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 453989101
 
Over the past years, we and others have significantly contributed to discoveries showing that inflammatory and immunological phenomena critically modulate cardiac pathophysiological processes including post-myocardial infarction (MI) repair, adverse remodelling, and the progression of heart failure (HF) with ischemic or non-ischemic aetiology. These inflammatory and immune responses in the heart greatly depend on context and time; the same molecular pathways can lead to opposite outcomes at different disease stages. Our consortium will investigate these stage-dependent immune and inflammatory responses, the driving intracellular pathways, and how these responses and pathways are modulated by cell-cell and organ interfaces. Moreover, despite the important mechanistic advances in knowledge, there are currently no clinical tools to stratify the inflammatory burden in patients with heart disease. Systematic gaps in understanding (mechanistically) and assessing (diagnostically) the complexity of Cardio-Immune Interfaces have posed major roadblocks to successful translation in this emerging field. In addition, a lack of MDs and PhDs trained in both disciplines (i.e. Immunology and Cardiology) has further hindered translation.Our planned consortium will address these unmet needs by providing an integrated mechanistic understanding of the dual roles of inflammation in heart diseases. Furthermore, we intend to develop novel immune-based diagnostic and therapeutic tools to aid heart disease patients and to address major translational milestones by bridging from rodent-based research to large animal models to clinical care. We also aim to create novel interdisciplinary academic structures to cover an educational gap and foster the development of MD/PhD experts in both Immunology and Cardiology. These integrated actions will be put into practice through a synergistic and multi-disciplinary Collaborative Research Centre (CRC). We strongly believe that the incipient field of Cardio-Immunology has reached a critical mass in Würzburg. Thus, we will combine our research efforts under a unifying conceptual framework committed to building from basic research to clinical translation. From a long-term perspective, we envision that our approach will help clinicians to efficiently identify and treat patients with high inflammatory burden who would benefit from tailored immunomodulatory therapeutic interventions. By unravelling the role of inflammation in cardiac diseases, our proposal advances knowledge of these complex, costly, and often deadly conditions.
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