The development of anti-inflammatory therapies in vascular disease like atherosclerosis, a chronic inflammatory disease in response to vascular lipid accumulation, has proven highly challenging. The limited access to human tissue samples and lack of innovative high-dimensional technologies to examine them may have contributed to the lack of significant conceptual advances in the field. Only recently, IL-1β inhibition has proven successful in preventing recurrent cardiovascular events in patients with recent myocardial infarction and elevated hsCRP. Yet the success of this therapy, although significant, is still limited to subsets of patients with vascular atherosclerosis.

PrIISM joined efforts with the Cardiovascular Research Center to build a state of the art Vascular Inflammatory Disease (VID) program that assemble a multidisciplinary team of basic vascular biologists and immunologists, computational scientists, clinical cardiologists, vascular surgeons, and experts in vascular imaging with the common goal to develop scientifically-based strategies that will help the design of precise immunotherapies against inflammatory vascular disease. VID members focus on ways to identify new immune cell subpopulations and dysregulations locally within the diseased vessel (i.e. atherosclerosis lesions) that will help the design of precise and molecularly targeted immune modulatory treatments to prevent lesion growth and rupture. We have developed a translational platform based on the use of non-invasive imaging modalities to validate that the anti-inflammatory efficacy of new candidate compounds in mice and translational large animal model of atherosclerosis.

Investigators with a major focus in vascular inflammatory disease include: Cai, Bishuang; Merad, Miriam; Swirski, Filip K.