Contact
Pilar Alcaide, Ph.D.
Professor and Vice Chair
Department of Microbiology and Immunology
Research Focus
The Alcaide lab combines the areas of immunology, vascular biology, and cardiac physiology to study the adaptive immune response in diverse inflammatory settings, with a particular focus on the heart in the context of heart failure. We use several in vivo mouse models of heart failure to investigate cardiac T cell immune responses. We also use in vitro flow systems to mimic lymphocyte trafficking under shear stress, and real time video microscopy to understand the mechanisms regulating T cell interactions with the vasculature and with stromal cells. These are combined with a variety of cellular and molecular biology approaches and advanced histopathology and single cell analysis techniques of human and mouse tissues. The overarching goals of the lab are to better understand what triggers T cell immune responses over time during heart disease, how T cells establish interactions with the vascular endothelium to be recruited to tissues and organs, and how, once infiltrated, T cells coordinate tissue and organ remodeling. The ultimate goal is to identify novel signatures that can potentially be targeted in therapeutically useful ways.