+A heart attack, or myocardial infarction, remains a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in Canada, with over 60,000 Canadians entering emergency rooms annually. The recovery from a heart attack requires a swift and coordinated response from our innate immune system, which responds to inflammatory signals generated by the infarct. Historically, it was believed this immune response, coordinated by monocytes and macrophages to clear debris and heal damaged tissue, had no lasting effect on the immune system. However, recent evidence from our group and others have shown this is not the case. In this talk, I’ll discuss the recently developed concept of inflammatory memory, wherein monocytes and macrophages acquire ‘learned’ behavior following inflammatory events such as a heart attack, via epigenetic modifications, which result in long-term altered responses to subsequent immune challenges. I’ll also discuss the ‘omics tools used to identify heart attack-induced inflammatory memory, and the effect of such memory on future disease risk.
0 commit comments