Andres Hidalgo, PhD

My lab studies the molecular and cellular mechanisms by which innate immune cells contribute to organismal physiology and pathology. We focus on the diversity in phenotype and function of these immune cells across tissues, age, and circadian time. We aim to understand how these properties are acquired, and their impact in pathology.

My research interests focus on the molecular and cellular mechanisms by which innate immune cells contribute to organismal physiology and pathology. My early studies focused on leukocyte migration to sites of inflammation and of hematopoietic stem cells into the bone marrow, and later extended to understand how key immune and hematopoietic cells (neutrophil, macrophages and hematopoietic stem cells or HSC) contribute to inflammatory disease, including acute vascular injury and atherosclerosis.As I became an independent group leader, I expanded these concepts to investigate how innate immune cells contribute to HSC dynamics and, more generally, how they contribute to homeostasis: we described a role for neutrophils as circadian regulators of bone marrow niches, and for platelets as triggers of intravascular inflammation. Most of our current efforts are centered in homeostasis, as I believe that dissecting the basic principles of a system is the right approach to understanding disease. We use animal models with impaired trafficking, high-end intravital microscopy, surgical models or cytokine-induced inflammation, myocardial infarction, stroke, acute lung injury and atherosclerosis to identify mechanisms, genes and molecules that can be potentially targeted in the clinic. A recent extension of our work is the study of clonal hematopoiesis, which extends the implications of our work to organismal aging, cancer and chronic inflammation.

I have successfully obtained continued funding since I started my own research in Spain from regional, national and European sources, as well as from the private sector. I have managed and used this financial support to train a new generation of scientists and to generate knowledge reflected in multiple high impact, peer-reviewed publications. While I am now based in Spain, I keep strong ties with North American fellows and in fact I currently share funding with scientists at Columbia, Harvard and Stanford through a Leducq Transatlantic Network. International recognition of our work has recently translated in my election to the editorial board of Blood, the leading journal of haematology (to start in January 2021).