The second theme of the laboratory relates to inflammation.
Severe sepsis remains a poorly understood systemic inflammatory condition with high mortality rates and limited therapeutic options outside of infection control and organ support measures.
Based on their recent discovery in mice showing that anthracycline drugs prevent organ failure without affecting the bacterial burden in a model of severe sepsis, we propose that strategies aimed at target organ protection have extraordinary potential for the treatment of sepsis and possibly for other inflammation-driven conditions.
However, the mechanisms of organ protection and disease tolerance are either unknown or poorly characterized.
The central goal of this research program is to identify and characterize novel cytoprotective mechanisms, with a focus on DNA damage response dependent protection activated by anthracyclines as a window into stress-induced genetic programs leading to tissue protection.