2018/10/18 by Jyoti Patel, Esther Lutgens · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Immunology and Microbiology · Medicine · #Adipokines, Inflammation, and Metabolic Diseases #Atherosclerosis and Cardiovascular Diseases #Cardiology #Diabetes and associated disorders #Immune system #Immunology #Medicine
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/cvr/cvy262
openalex publication_date 2018/10/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Watch the interview here:youtube.com/watch?v=AQ1ZcrFpms8. Highlight ‘The trick will be to combine anti-inflammatory therapies with lipid lowering therapies and figure out which patients benefit from lipid lowering, which patients benefit from lowering of inflammation and which patients requires combination therapy’.—Professor Esther Lutgens Biography Professor Esther Lutgens is Professor of Vascular Immunopathology at Amsterdam University Medical Centre and visiting Professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. Prof Lutgens received her medical degree and PhD from the University of Maastricht, The Netherlands and completed post-doctoral training in the Department of Pathology, University of Maastricht as well as Harvard Medical School, Boston and Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, USA before becoming an Assistant Professor at the Cardiovascular Research Institute, Maastricht. Her research interest has focused on the modulation of co-stimulatory pathways and the immune system in vascular inflammation. Her laboratory investigates the CD40-CD40L signalling axis in atherosclerosis and how CD40-TRAF interactions in different cell-types and pathologies mediate the immune cell phenotype. This has led to the development and testing of small compounds directed against the CD40 binding pocket of TRAF6. More recently, Prof Lutgens has moved to performing detailed screening on the role of CD40L in obesity, as well as in HSPC biology. Professor Lutgens explains how her research career started as a medical student, when she became interested in the cardiovascular system and then the immune system. After spending a medical internship with Prof Mat Daemen at the University of Maastricht where she started looking at cellular proliferation in the atherosclerotic plaque, she discovered that there were important roles for immune cells in the plaque. She has two key discoveries to date; she found expression of the CD40 ligand in the atherosclerotic plaque and followed this up with murine studies through a collaboration with the company Biogen and Richard Flavel at Yale University. They observed a striking phenotype in CD40 ligand deficient mice; they had reduced atherosclerosis and had stable plaques which are highly significant in the clinical setting. This led to further studies to elucidate the mechanism behind this signalling pathway and the discovery of the role of the intermediate signalling factor TRAF6 and its interaction with CD40 ligand. This interaction was found to be a key driver of atherosclerosis and led to the development of small molecule compounds to inhibit atherosclerosis progression. Professor Lutgens believes the next generation of therapies to target the immune system and atherosclerosis will be to combine lipid lowering drugs with immune modulators and to tailor those towards patients that respond differently. Dr Jyoti Patel from the University of Oxford interviews Professor Esther Lutgens, Associate Professor at the Academic Medical Centre (Amsterdam) and recent winner of the ESC s Outstanding Achievement Award.