Pathobiology 2027

This session examines how peripheral metabolic dysfunction reaches across the blood-brain barrier to drive neuroinflammation and cognitive decline. Talks will span the lipid, immune, and cellular circuits linking cardiometabolic disease to brain health – from disrupted lipoprotein metabolism as a shared driver of cardiometabolic and neurodegenerative disease, to microglial lipid handling as a central node in metabolic neuroinflammation, to T-cell-mediated circuits connecting liver inflammation to the CNS. Together, the speakers offer complementary mechanistic entry points – lipid metabolism, innate immune (microglial) responses, and adaptive immune (T-cell) trafficking – into a common question: how does peripheral metabolic disease reprogram the neuroimmune landscape of the brain?