Grant: Project Grant

Autophagy is a highly regulated degradative process in which the cell digests resident or foreign intracellular components. The autophagy pathway is an integral adaptive response to counter several potentially harmful cellular conditions including: starvation, infection, accumulation of toxic protein aggregates, and organelle damage. Dysregulation of the autophagy pathway has been implicated in several diseases including Crohn's Disease, cancer, neurodegeneration and cardiomyopathy. However, fundamental gaps exist in our understanding of how the autophagy pathway is regulated (or dysregulated in disease) that have largely precluded our ability to pharmacologically target perturbations of this promising pathway. The first goal of this project is to understand how a network of autophagy-related genes coordinate the anti-microbial response. Our second goal is to validate a targeted treatment strategy to rescue autophagy defects in CD-patients.