Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

When our bodies are attached by pathogens, inflammation is an important host-defense mechanism that protects us. However, excessive inflammation leads to diseases such as arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease and cancer therefore it must be tightly controlled. Our lab is interested in one of the natural inflammation mediators that our body produce called interleukin-10 (IL-10), which is a type of hormone. IL-10 is a regulator that binds to immune cells to inhibit inflammatory response. Understanding the mechanisms by which IL-10 use to regulate immune cells will provide insight development of novel therapeutics mimicking the beneficial anti-inflammatory effects of IL-10. The best studied pathway used by IL-10 to inhibit inflammation involves the transcription factor STAT3. However, we have recently found that IL-10 also activates the SHIP1 pathway and that this pathway cooperates with the STAT3 pathway. I propose to study in greater detail the mechanism by which the SHIP1 pathway mediates the immediate ant-inflammatory action of IL-10 and how the SHIP1 pathway cooperates with the STAT3 pathway. These studies will lead to a better understanding of how IL-10 functions and may aid in developing new methods for treating inflammatory diseases.