Brant Isakson, PhD, discusses microcirculation and blood vessels the width of one of your hairs.

Brant Isakson, PhD, Professor in Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics
Transcript:
I love the discovery aspect about research. That's really what drives the work in our lab is discovery, and we work in the microcirculation. It's the business end of the blood vessels. It's where inflammation is regulated, it's where blood pressure is regulated. And there's a lot of new things that we're discovering all the time. A lot of things that we think can be used for translational aspects of discovery of new potential targets for therapeutics.
My name is Brant Isaacson, and I'm a professor in molecular physiology and biological physics. I'm also a resident faculty of the Robert and Bernard Cardiovascular Research Center, and that's where our work is focused. We're in the cardiovascular system and specifically in the microcirculation, and we take out very small blood vessels about the width of one of your hairs and try to figure out how they dilate and how they constrict.
We use other imaging techniques to look at how lipids are taken up and how inflammatory cells enter the tissue.
Because of the collaborative environment here at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. We've been able to work closely with physicians to test some of our ideas and some of our targets that we've discovered on human samples and see if this could be a way that we could modulate blood pressure.