Degenerative Disease
Labs studying Degenerative Disease
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Ahn Lab
The Ahn Lab investigates mammalian cell signaling, including the roles of protein molecular motions and cell membrane trafficking. They are particularly interested in understanding situations such as cancer where these processes go awry, how to turn this into a cellular vulnerability for targeted therapies, and strategies to overcome cancer drug resistance.Ìý
Calve Lab
The Calve Musculoskeletal ExtracellularÌý MatrixÌý Lab characterizes the material properties of assembling tissues to establish design parameters for regenerative therapies. They are particularly interested in the composition and spatial organization of the extracellular matrix, its influence on muscle mechanical properties, and the application of hyaluronic acid to muscle repair and regeneration.
Cech Lab
The Cech Lab specializes in functional RNAs, from the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of catalytic RNAs (ribozymes) to dissecting the RNA-protein complex telomerase that creates and maintains the protective ends of chromosomes to recent work on exploring the vast new territory of long noncoding RNAs to ascribe molecular function to these gene products.Ìý
Ferguson Lab
The Ferguson Biomechanics and Biomimetic Lab studies how the microstructure, composition, and material properties of tissues influence mechanical behavior. Further, they examine how these properties change with disrupted mechanical loading, aging, or disease.
Hill Lab
The Hill Lab studies how gut microbes impact the pancreas. Their research has implications for Type I Diabetes, pancreatic cancer, and fetal pancreas development. Their goal is to develop microbially-derived treatments to prevent or reverse disease.
Hough Lab
The Hough Lab studies the physical properties of naturally disordered proteins using experimental physics, computational biology, and cell biology. They leverage their discoveries about proteins in healthy cells to understand how disordered proteins contribute to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
Leinwand Lab
The Leinwand Lab are leaders in the molecular cardiology field. Their interdisciplinary studies close the gap between disease-causing mutations and the manifestations of heart disease. Moreover, they are pioneers in examining disease modifying factors such as biological sex, diet, exercise, and hormone status, and they specialize in detailed analyses of the motor protein myosin. Their discoveries underpinned the first ever approved drug for the genetic heart disease hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.ÌýÌý
Link Lab
The Link Lab examines the cellular and molecular basis of age-associated neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. They focus on the mechanisms by which specific proteins central to these diseases induce pathology.Ìý
Lynch Lab
The Lynch Lab studies the skeletal mechanical environment and its regulation of cancer using mechanical loading model systems to correlate cellular function with cancer pathogenesis, tissue-level changes in tumor burden, and skeletal tissue strength. They aim to identify targets for treating and preventing bone metastases as well as cancer-associated reductions in bone strength.
Mukherjee Lab
The Mukherjee Lab investigates the flow, transport, and mechanical underpinnings of physiological processes and develops tools for disease biomechanics, medical device design, treatment planning, and drug delivery. A primary application area is in cardiovascular and cerebrovascular processes in healthy and diseased states, like stroke, thrombosis, and embolisms.Ìý
Neu Lab
The Neu Soft Tissue Bioengineering Lab develops technology for fundamental study and engineering of connective and cardiac tissues to inform new therapies for disorders of the connective and cardiac tissues, including arthritis and fibrosis. Biomechanics is a central lab theme, and they span multiple engineering and biology disciplines, including mechanical, electrical, micro/nanotechological, biochemical, and physiological subspecialties.Ìý
Olwin Lab
The Olwin Lab examines the mechanisms regulating the growth, differentiation and self-renewal of skeletal muscle stem cells (satellite cells) for eventual use in cell-based gene therapy approaches. They use molecular genetics, cell biology, and cellular biochemistry to understand satellite cell self-renewal and to investigage age-related decline and neuromuscular diseases.Ìý
Palmer Lab
The Palmer Lab investigates how cells regulate and respond to metal ions, how pathogens alter cell biology, and how to engineer dynamic fluorescent proteins to report on cellular changes. Their work lies at the interface of chemistry and biology and has included the development of novel, genetically encoded molecular tools.Ìý
Parker Lab
The Parker Lab studies the cellular regulation of RNA molecules and how that both contributes to normal cellular function and leads to disease when it goes awry. They focus specifically on understanding RNA degradation, how the RNA chaperone network prevents RNA aggregation, and the connections between RNA and the protein tau, especially in neurodegenerative diseases.
Spencer Lab
The Spencer Lab investigates cell signaling mechanisms to understand how these signals go awry in cancer with the goal of altering the fate of individual cells. They study single cells, which display remarkable variability in these processes within a genetically identical cellular population, using fluorescent sensors they developed in long-term live-cell microscopy and cell tracking experiments to quantify signaling dynamics controlling cell fate.
Sprenger Lab
The Sprenger Rationally Designed Immunotherapeutics & Interfaces (RDI) Research Group employs modern computational techniques to tackle big problems, from infectious diseases to climate change. This includes molecular simulation, mathematical modeling, and machine learning techniques to describe complex interfacial phenomena, such as pathogen-antibody (for vaccine design) and small molecule-cell membrane (for treating brain-based diseases).Ìý
Welker Lab
The Welker Lab works on movement assistive devices at the intersection of biomechanics, haptics, and robotics. Their work on the human-device as a system aims to improve movement for individuals with impairments or injuries and to reduce injury or prevent fatigue in the healthy population.