About the Vascular Medicine Institute
The Vascular Medicine Institute (VMI) harnesses inter-disciplinary teams of researchers across heart, lung, and blood biology to expand our understanding of how our blood vessels communicate at a molecular level with other organ systems in health and disease. We combine computational biology and genetic sequencing with lab experimentation, bioengineering, and human clinical trials to ensure that all of our discoveries are meaningful to our patients. In the past year alone, our work has identified fundamental ways that the heart and blood vessels respond to low oxygen in heart failure and pulmonary hypertension, how inflammation controls risk of heart attacks and strokes, and how sickle cell disease causes brain injury and cognitive decline. Currently, we are pioneering new discoveries of how the heart and lungs are linked to neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease (a brain-heart-lung axis), how obesity changes the heart’s response to heart failure therapies, and how we can engineer and 3D bioprint functional blood vessels, as well as many other areas. These discoveries will pave the way to new diagnostic and drug development strategies, with the hope of developing new disease therapies targeting the most severely affected individuals and those who are least responsive to current treatments.