(Vienna, 30 August 2021) Dimitrios Tsiantoulas from the Department of Laboratory Medicine at the Medical University of Vienna has been awarded a grant totalling around €400,000 by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) to study the effects of cytokine tumour necrosis factor TNFSF13 in heart attacks.
A heart attack (also known as myocardial infarction) occurs when an artery supplying the heart with blood becomes blocked due to complications of atherosclerotic coronary heart disease, resulting in necrosis of the myocardial cells. The immune system response to myocardial injury is a key determinant of wound healing following myocardial infarction. However, the function of TNFSF13 in the post-MI inflammatory process is not yet known. The aim of the studies is to analyse the role of TNFSF13 in myocardial infarction and thus identify exact immunotherapy strategies for the management of this clinical complication (FWF independent project No. P 35233).
About Dimitrios Tsiantoulas
Dimitrios Tsiantoulas is a group leader at the Department of Laboratory Medicine of the Medical University of Vienna. He completed his doctorate at MedUni Vienna and at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine under the supervision of Christoph Binder. After graduating, he worked as a post-doctoral researcher funded by the British Heart Foundation in Professor Ziad Mallat's group at the University of Cambridge.