Zahi A. Fayad, Ph.D.
Director, BioMedical Engineeri
Director, Cardiovascular Imaging Program
Lucy G. Moses Professor in Medical Imaging and Bioengineering
Vice-Chair for Research, Department of Radiology
Professor of Radiology and Medicine (Cardiology)
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York
Seminar Information
The immune system’s role in atherosclerosis has long been an important research topic and is increasingly investigated for therapeutic and diagnostic purposes. Therefore, noninvasive imaging of hematopoietic organs and immune cells will undoubtedly improve atherosclerosis phenotyping and serve as a monitoring method for immunotherapeutic treatments. Positron emission tomography’s unique features make it an ideal tool to quantitatively image the immune response in the context of atherosclerosis and afford reliable readouts to guide medical interventions in cardiovascular disease. Here, I summarize the state of the art in the field of atherosclerosis PET immunoimaging and provide an outlook on current and future applications. I will also cover some of the possibilities of using nanobiologics for immunotherapy for the treatment of atherosclerosis.
Zahi A. Fayad, PhD serves as the Lucy G. Moses Professor of Medical Imaging and Bioengineering at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He is Professor of Radiology (vice-chair for research) and Professor of Medicine (Cardiology). He is the founding Director of the Translational and Molecular Imaging Institute. Dr. Fayad’s research has been dedicated to the detection and prevention of cardiovascular disease with many seminal contributions in the field of multimodality biomedical imaging (MR, CT, PET and PET/MR) and nanomedicine. Recent collaborative work has been in: 1) the study of psychosocial stress exposure in the brain, the cardiovascular system and the immune system; 2) the development of platform nanotechnology to produce nanobiologics for immunotherapy in multiple disease conditions; 3) the development of the Mount Sinai Imaging Research Warehouse (de-identified, pseudo-anonymized images and metadata) as a unique repository of radiological imaging big data for focused imaging and general healthcare research.