 Today on The Heartbeat, we continue our journey with Dr. Darren Woodside. Since arriving to THI in 2008, Dr. Woodside has been a member of the molecular cardiology team. He is exploring the potential of immunotherapies for treating a variety of inflammatory conditions that impact the heart and other organs in the body. Dr. Woodside's team illuminated the essential role of cell adhesion in the immune system. They discovered promising new compounds that activate important interactions in the body that are required for a strong immune response to treatments. I don't know how anybody can't be interested in the immune system, especially now, right? It's kind of forefront on everybody's minds. To me, the interest kind of stemmed from the fact that, you know, you have in your body right now millions and millions of cells that are crawling around all your tissues. They're in your bloodstream, they're getting out of your bloodstream, they're looking around for foreign invaders in your body and they're trying to knock them out, you know? Harnessing that for the good is tricky, but it is very, very interesting. And for instance, if we're talking things like vaccines, that's on everybody's mind right now. The process of developing a good vaccine requires a robust immune response. And some of the work that we've done in the lab actually turns out to really ramp up the immune response and hopefully now what we're seeing in phase one clinical trials in humans. What we're doing is developing basically a universal type of system that can allow addition of our drugs to any type of vaccine that's under development right now and enhance that immune response to the vaccines. So when you think of something like the flu, right, in elderly it isn't as effective as in younger people, yet we know that there are very bad consequences in cardiovascular disease if you catch the flu. And so if we can enhance the response to flu vaccines in the elderly, we can make a significant impact in patient lives. In our lab we've developed ways to enhance cell adhesion, but we've also developed ways to inhibit cell adhesion. And you can think of an inflammatory response, right, the easiest which may not be the most aesthetically pleasing is like a blemish or a pimple. There's swelling, there's redness, there's heat and that's because all these cells are accumulating there and they're eating up the bacteria that are in that blemish and they're causing the immune response. What you can think of in cardiovascular disease if you're going to inhibit inflammation you can prevent those cells from getting to those sites. Then the analogy you can think of in cardiovascular disease is atherosclerosis where you have plaque buildup in your vasculature, in your arteries. That plaque is really an inflammatory response inside your artery, right. If it gets too bad it could burst and if it bursts you get a stroke or a heart attack. So if you could limit the amount of cells that are getting into that plaque you might be able to treat the underlying inflammatory risk that's common in cardiovascular disease. Some of the tools that we're doing that are with just drugs that we're developing with our medicinal chemists in our research group to prevent cells from adhering and getting into these plaques. Other ways that we're approaching diagnostic or even drug development strategies is marking these specific inflammatory cells with reagents that you can use for instance in magnetic resonance imaging, MRI, so that you can see these inflammatory plaques and maybe in the future if we can identify patients that have plaques that might be vulnerable to rupture we can then specifically treat them in a different way so that we could actually prevent that from happening and prevent a heart attack and prevent stroke. What do you like to do for fun? If it's not discovery what's the second thing? Besides discovery? Yes. My family has always enjoyed the outdoors and I like to do a lot of outdoor activities like fishing and I guess that's just discovering something else in the ocean right? You never know what you're going to catch when you're fishing in the ocean so. Like research? Exactly, yeah it's another extension of what we do in the lab. We look forward to seeing you next time on a new episode of The Heartbeat. Until then you can find Dr. Woodside fishing off the coast of Galveston Island with his family while casting a line for the next first. For The Heartbeat, I'm Maya Palmroy.