Metabolismo, inmunología y riesgo cardiovascular

Main Research lines:

1-Regulation of LXR activity
        a-Impact of LXRalpha phosphorylation on cardiometabolic disease development
        b-LXR-modulated metabolism in human immune cells

2. Immunity & metabolism
        a-Interferon response factor 8 (IRF8)-LXR crosstalk: impact on atherosclerosis
        b-IFN signalling & and cholesterol metabolism in human monocytes
        c-Cholesterol and sex hormone crosstalk in human immune cells 

3. Understanding cardiovascular risk and lipid metabolism in autoimmune diseases:
        a-Mechanisms underlying increased cardiovascular risk in women with SLE
        b-Identification of multi-omic signatures 

4. Women & cardiovascular disease: Identification of multi-omic signatures
Identification of subclinical and pathological phenotypic groups for better stratification of patients for future pharmacological or nutritional interventions.

Background

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains the leading cause of mortality for women worldwide, including Spain, where 6% more women compared to men die of this disease. Despite this, women remain understudied, underdiagnosed and undertreated and they are significantly underrepresented in cardiometabolic trials. Cardiovascular risk factors, such as lipid and lipoprotein profiles, change substantially in women during their lifetime and immune responses can also present sex differences . The main pathology underlying ischemic CVD is atherosclerosis, a process resulting from dysregulation and build-up of lipids alongside inflammation and other immune responses in the vascular wall. 

Research focus

My group aims to understand how lipid metabolism affects systemic and intracellular metabolic and immune pathways and how that affects the development and severity of metabolic, cardiovascular and immune diseases.

We use a range of cell/molecular biology, genomic, lipidomic, metabolomic and computational approaches. These allows us to elucidate molecular mechanisms underlying disease and identify molecular and metabolic signatures that will help stratify patient groups to implement a precision medicine-based approach.

The overall goals are to a) uncover novel modes of crosstalk between lipid metabolism and immunity and b) to understand the regulation of lipid metabolism at the level of gene expression, mainly mediated by the Liver X Receptor-LXR and interferon response factors (IRFs) and C) investigate the interaction between lipid metabolism and sex hormone signalling in immune cells. We aim to understand how metabolic and immune pathways impact the progression of metabolic, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases while elucidating these pathways particularly in women, who have been traditionally underrepresented in cardiometabolic studies.