Heart failure is a leading cause of hospitalization and mortality and is characterized by progressive systemic and cardiac inflammation. About 50% of heart failure patients have impaired cardiac contractility and heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF), while the remaining 50% have heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). Notably, the treatments that improve survival and outcomes in patients with HFrEF have not provided clinical benefit in HFpEF patients, who often present with multiple comorbidities, including obesity and hypertension. 

This seminar will discuss novel mechanistic insights into how T cell immune responses contribute to systemic and cardiac inflammation and participate in adverse cardiac remodeling in experimental models of HFrEF and HFpEF. These include T cell recognition of cardiac neoantigens being presented by conventional and non-conventional antigen-presenting cells and alternative pathways of T cell activation that may distinguish HFrEF from HFpEF and help identify therapeutic targets for immunomodulation in different etiologies of heart failure.

Alcaide's research focuses on understanding the role of T lymphocytes in heart inflammation and their impact on the progression of heart failure, with the goal of unveiling new pathways that can potentially be targeted in therapeutic useful ways. She's been published in prestigious journals, including Circulation, Journal of Experimental Medicine, Journal of Clinical Investigation, and Nature Cardiovascular Research, resulting in continuously founded NIH grants and private funding.

Alcaide is a Fellow of the American Heart Association, and she's the vice president, soon to become President, of the American Society of Investigative Pathology. She serves as associate editor of the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology and the Journal of Leukocyte Biology and on editorial boards of the Journal of Clinical Investigation Insight, Circulation Research, Circulation: Heart Failure, and FASEB Journal. Alcaide received her Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Immunology from Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain.