Pilar Alcaide, Ph.D., M.S.

The Alcaide lab at Tufts University School of Medicine combines the areas of immunology, vascular biology, and cardiac physiology to study the adaptive immune response in diverse inflammatory settings, with a particular focus on the heart in the context of heart failure. The over-arching goal of the lab is to better understand the molecular and cellular mechanisms taking place during T lymphocyte trafficking and how those can potentially be targeted in therapeutically useful ways. The Alcaide lab uses several in vivo mouse models of heart failure to study the T cell immune responses involved in cardiac pathophysiology, combined with a broad range of immunological approaches. T cell crosstalk with endothelial cells are studied using in vitro flow systems and real time video microscopy, and they use additional state of the art approaches to investigate the implications of T cell responses on cardiac resident cells.