Infective endocarditis is a mostly bacterial infection of the heart valves and, due to its non-specific symptoms and late diagnosis, is often associated with a poor prognosis – almost a third of those affected die within a year as a result of endocarditis.
Current treatment options are limited to lengthy courses of antibiotics and complex heart surgery, with older patients in particular often unable to undergo surgery and dying from the disease due to a lack of treatment options. A deeper understanding of the local and systemic immune response to infectious endocarditis, about which little data is currently available, could lead to the development of new treatment approaches.
As part of the ENDORSE project (‘Innovative therapeutic approaches in infective ENDOcarditis leveraging reveRSE translation’) funded by the Corona Foundation, Rainer Kaiser will investigate immune targets that could represent new therapeutic approaches in endocarditis based on multi-omics-supported phenotyping of the immune response in endocarditis patients. To this end, the junior research group is using patient biosamples, customised in vitro methods such as biologically active 3D models of valve vegetations, and a translational mouse model of endocarditis.
PD Dr. Rainer Kaiser studied medicine at Heidelberg University and obtained his doctorate at Cologne University. Since 2019, he has been working as a clinician scientist at the DZHK site in Munich, where he completed his specialist training in internal medicine and cardiology at the LMU Clinic and obtained an additional qualification in emergency medicine. Since 2024, Rainer Kaiser has been leading a junior research group at the Interfaculty Center for Endocrine and Cardiovascular Disease Network Modeling and Clinical Transfer (ICON).
Source: German Foundation Centre
