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

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• Mario Aguilera- [email protected]

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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."

To explore these interactions, Augustine's team will employ a comprehensive research strategy using mice that will track body parameters such as heart rate, blood pressure and body temperature. Using the science of transcriptomics, which focuses on RNA transcripts, they will study single-cell and spatial evidence of damaged heart muscle tissue to probe molecular and immune mechanisms at work.

"Assistant Professor Augustine is driving innovative approaches that will deepen our understanding of how heart attacks unfold by interactions between the heart, the immune system, the nervous system and the brain," said School of Biological Sciences Dean Kit Pogliano. "We are extremely grateful to the Keck Foundation for supporting this and other bold research that will lead to new discoveries in human health, which is especially critical during this uncertain time for biomedical research funding."

The three-year initiative also will manipulate cardiac sensory neurons with cutting-edge genetics techniques, including optogenetics, which uses light to manipulate the activity of cells, and chemogenetics, a method for controlling neural activity through engineered receptors.

The researchers will also use machine learning to decode neural activity and come up with metrics that could predict heart attacks. Such "closed-loop interventions" represent a potentially powerful new way to predict heart attacks and provide immediate intervention.

"By combining cardiology, immunology, neuroscience and machine learning, these studies could revolutionize cardiovascular care by leveraging the powerful connection between the heart and brain," said Augustine. "This will be a novel perspective to study heart attacks, which are the world's leading killer."

About the W. M. Keck Foundation

The W. M. Keck Foundation was established in 1954 in Los Angeles by William Myron Keck, founder of The Superior Oil Company.  One of the nation's largest philanthropic organizations, the W. M. Keck Foundation supports outstanding science, engineering and medical research.  The Foundation also supports undergraduate education and maintains a program within Southern California to support arts and culture, education, health and community service projects.