Vascular Ageing

Vascular endothelial cells (ECs) that line blood vessels are not just passive conduits for delivering blood. Rather, ECs also play tissue-specific functions by providing highly specialized sets of angiocrine factors at different body locations. These factors are essential for the intercellular communication between ECs and other cell types, as they play key roles in homeostasis maintenance and organ regeneration. Therefore, it is important to assess how these angiocrine repertoires change with age, and how such changes impair organ function under normal and stressed conditions.

Over the last years we have focused on studying ECs in different tissues severely affected by age-related disorders, namely the eye choroid (age-related macular degeneration), the liver (age-related impaired regeneration after partial resection), and the cardiovascular system (atherosclerosis and cardiac dysfunction). We have studied age-related vascular alterations both during physiological aging and in mouse models of Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome (HGPS), a rare disease that induces accelerated aging, cardiovascular pathology, and premature death.

Currently, our general aims are:

1) to assess how repertoires of tissue-specific endothelial angiocrine factors change with age, using single cell RNAseq as a discovery platform.

2) to study how aged ECs impair organ function and regeneration under normal and stressed conditions.

3) to investigate the mechanisms that mediate age-related endothelial alterations, with a special focus on epigenetics and mechanotransduction.

4) to develop EC-targeted therapeutic approaches to fight age-related diseases.