Augustine Lab
Principal Investigator: Vineet Augustine
Institution: University of California San Diego (La Jolla, CA)
Primary Subfield: Neuroscience
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Project Summary Myocardial infarction (MI) remains a principal cause of global morbidity, commonly progressing to heart failure despite contemporary treatments. Evidence from basic and clinical research highlights a critical, yet incompletely defined, interplay between cardiac injury signals, brain integration, and peripheral sympathetic outflow. Based on preliminary data, this proposal adopts a cardiac-neuro-immune perspective, hypothesizing that three key hubs- transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) vagal sensory neurons (VSNs) projecting to the infarcted ventricle, hypothalamic angiotensin II receptor type 1 (AT1aR) neurons activated by MI, and interleukin-1 beta (IL1β) signaling in the superior cervical ganglia (SCG) - constitute an interoceptive loop that drives or mitigates adverse remodeling after MI. Preliminary findings indicate that ablating TRPV1 VSNs diminishes infarct size and inflammatory cytokines, while blocking IL1β in the SCG enhances cardiac function. Moreover, inhibiting AT1aR neurons in the hypothalamus appears to reduce maladaptive sympathetic output. The central hypothesis is that coordinating interventions at these three nodes can mitigate patholog…
Active NIH Awards
- 1R01HL183128-01: Cardiac Protection by Neuromodulation after Myocardial Infarction (2026)
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