New therapeutic approaches for infective endocarditis

PD Dr. Rainer Kaiser from the LMU Hospital in Munich is investigating the local and systemic immune response to infective endocarditis with the aim of developing new treatment options for this often fatal disease.

Infective endocarditis is a mostly bacterial infection of the heart valves and is often associated with a poor prognosis due to the unspecific symptoms and late diagnosis - almost a third of patients die within a year as a result of endocarditis. Current treatment options are limited to lengthy courses of antibiotics and complex heart surgery, whereby patients are often inoperable and die from the disease due to a lack of therapeutic approaches. A deeper understanding of the immune response to infective endocarditis, about which little data is available to date, could lead to the development of new therapeutic approaches.

As part of the ENDORSE ("Innovative therapeutic approaches in infective ENDOcarditis leveraging reveRSE translation") project funded by the Corona Foundation, Dr. Kaiser will use multi-omics-based phenotyping of the immune response in endocarditis patients to investigate immunological target structures that could serve as a therapeutic point of attack. To this end, the working group uses biosamples from patients, customized in vitro methods such as biologically active 3D models of valve vegetations, and a translational mouse model of endocarditis.

PD Dr. Rainer Kaiser studied human medicine at the University of Heidelberg and completed his doctorate at the University of Cologne. Since 2019, he has been working as a Clinician Scientist at the LMU Hospital in Munich, where he completed his specialist training in internal medicine and cardiology as well as his additional qualification in emergency medicine. Since 2024, PD Dr. Rainer Kaiser has headed a junior research group at the Interfaculty Center for Endocrine and Cardiovascular Disease Network Modeling and Clinical Transfer (ICON).