I'm Federica Marelli-Berg. I'm the BHF Professor of Cardiovascular Immunology.
I'm working in the William Harvey Research Institute
which is part of the Queen Mary 
University of London.
It is becoming clear that immunology plays a major part
in a number of cardiovascular conditions.
My research is in transplantation
and how the immune response 
is able to destroy the transplanted heart,
and what we can do to prevent that.
But also on improving 
the way we treat heart transplant rejection.
So one of the main problems 
with the therapy that goes with the transplant
is that it doesn't discriminate 
between good immune response -
that are those that prevent us from getting 
infections and cancer,
and bad immune responses, 
which are the ones that reject the heart.
We know that T-cells, which are the white blood cells
which are responsible for 
killing the graft, the transplant,
use very specific pathways to go to different organs.
And they do this by expressing certain molecules,
which we can call like an area code on their surface.
So we did an experiment in mice.
We transplanted the heart and skin 
with the same mismatch.
And we targeted with a drug this particular molecule.
75-percent of these mice did not reject the heart.
They did continue to reject the skin,
showing that the immunosuppression in this case
was selectively targeting the heart 
but not the rest of the body.
Now we are trying to set up collaborations
to look at the presence and the frequency 
of these T-cells
in patients with other diseases that affect the heart, such as myocarditis.
It is very difficult to diagnose 
and there is no therapy.
We know that these cells are increased 
in patients with myocarditis
so we are hoping to arrive to a more reliable diagnosis.
My plan for the future is really to look at 
the immunology of the heart
and address what role these T-cells play 
in a variety of diseases.
For example, mice that do not have T lymphocytes,
they do not develop hypertension.
So I'm hoping to be able to tackle many issues 
that have to do with cardiovascular diseases
from my own perspective of an immunologist, 
very soon.
