Macrophage Activation in Vascular Disease: Multidisciplinary Target Discovery Research

Masanori Aikawa, MD, PhD

Harvard Medical School/Brigham and Women's Hospital

Dr. Masanori Aikawa is Yoshihiro Miwa Associate Chair and Founding Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Cardiovascular Sciences (CICS) at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and also serves as Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. At CICS, he established a new model of the academia-industry collaboration in drug discovery research. He also runs his research laboratory in the Center for Excellence in Vascular Biology at BWH/HMS, primarily supported by the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association. His research interests include the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis and metabolic disorders, and macrophage biology. Over the past several years, he has studied new mechanisms that trigger macrophage activation, including the Dll4-Notch signaling, the Akt/β-catenin pathway, and the pro-inflammatory action of apoCIII. More recently, his group has used global proteomics to ideitify new regulators of macrophage activation.