Epigenetic control of wound-healing and fibrosis
| Dates: | 27 January 2015 |
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| Times: | 13:00 - 14:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | Faculty of Life Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff |
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| Speaker: | Derek Mann |
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Part of the Tissue Systems seminar series. Effective wound-healing is essential for repair and regeneration of damaged and infected tissues. Ineffective or overactive wound-healing results in pathologies that are associated with increased morbidity and mortality such as open sores, ulceration or tissue fibrosis. The latter is a pathology in which excess deposition of fibril-forming collagen-rich extracellular matrix leads to the progressive replacement of normal functional tissue with a fibrotic scar. Fibrosis is a feature of chronic disease in multiple major organs including the liver, lungs, kidney, heart and pancreas. At present it is difficult to predict which patients suffering a chronic organ disease will develop progressive fibrosis and we have a lack of proven effective anti-fibrotic medicines with which to treat these people. Our laboratory has taken the approach of investigating epigenetic mechanisms that underpin the fibrotic process with the aim of developing improved prognostic tools and new anti-fibrotic targets. The seminar will cover our evidence that fibrosis is an epigenetically controlled process and identify several epigenetic regulators (MeCP2, ASH1 and EZH2) that can be targeted to suppress fibrosis in the diseased liver. In the second half of the seminar the potential for heritable epigenetic factors that influence fibrosis will be discussed, this will include data showing that ancestral history of liver fibrosis can result in developmental adaptions that impact on wound-healing in the liver and skin in a trans-generational manner. Finally, new data will be presented that addresses the molecular mechanisms by which epigenetic traits impacting on wound-healing might be transmitted via the germ line.
Speaker
Derek Mann
Organisation: Newcastle University
Travel and Contact Information
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Lecture Theatre
Michael Smith Building
Manchester
