$1.2M Award from the Keck Foundation Supports Innovative Study of Heart Attacks

Assistant Professor Vineet Augustine’s groundbreaking research linking heart-brain connections could revolutionize cardiovascular care

Excerpt from the Press Release:

Heart disease, which kills millions each year, remains the world’s leading cause of death.

While cardiac research has mainly focused on heart attacks as isolated episodes, Assistant Professor Vineet Augustine of the University of California San Diego proposes a new way of studying such life-threatening events.

The W.M. Keck Foundation has awarded $1.2 million to Augustine’s lab in the UC San Diego School of Biological Sciences to focus on heart attacks as events that combine neurological and immunological systems, driven by the interaction between the heart and brain. While the integrated interactions of the cardiac, nervous and immune systems have been relatively less studied, the new initiative leverages neuroscience and data science tools to help unravel the root causes of heart attacks in the hopes of developing new ways of understanding and treating such episodes.

“Our approach is to have a go at heart attacks from a novel perspective with the hope of developing better therapeutics,” said Augustine. “Our main hypothesis is that during a heart attack, or myocardial infarction, inadequate blood flows to the heart, causing the heart to send out alerts about tissue damage, loss of oxygen and immune activation. The brain interprets these signals as an acute stress episode. This triggers neural circuits to initiate an inflammatory response through the body’s sympathetic nervous system.”

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