WEBVTT

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When we look at tissues,
if you look at your skin,

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it's a very stable system of cells, right?

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It doesn't just spontaneously
turn into liver tissue

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or into lung tissue
or into pancreatic tissue,

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and that's kind of remarkable
because the genes in the cells,

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within your skin are all the genes
that are there to make liver are there.

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All the genes that are there
to make lung are there.

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They're just silenced
or they're turned off

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or some of them are turned on,
but in specific combinations,

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and when you get a certain set of cells
expressing certain genes in certain ways

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and talking to each other in certain ways,

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you get this thing
that we call skin tissue.

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So that question of why,

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why are tissues stable in this way?

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That's like one of the very central questions right now within tissue systems bio.

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One of the things that my lab has sort of
started to specialize in

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is the cell to cell communication
within these multicellular systems.

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So like lung tissue is one
that we study very deeply

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and when you look at the lung,
it's a community of like 50

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to 70 unique cell types or cell states
that are, that are quite distinct

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and you might have a couple dozen
of those cell types really close together,

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and they're all talking to each other
in these very complex ways

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and the ways that they talk to each other,

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reinforces that tissue’s stability.

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It sort of keeps lung tissue
behaving like lung tissue

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and stops it from deviating out of homeostasis

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and so when we study cell to cell
signaling it gives us a window

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into how these cellular communities
in our body are talking to one another

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and how they're reinforcing that stability,

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and we can also see during
pathology during disease,

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how this cellular communication
deviates from the norm

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and the holy grail would be to be able
to get involved in this conversation

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so that we can take disease tissues that
we see in human beings in clinical pathology

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and actually encourage that, like
steer them back to homeostasis,

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sort of tell them, oh, stop being
diseased, come back to the norm,

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and this is this is what I think of now
when I think about regenerative medicine.

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We've really started to develop...

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the technologists in this
space are doing wizardry.

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They're doing amazing things,
and they're starting to develop

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what are called spatial transcriptomics
or spatial multi-omics.

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You get a you take a tissue,

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you can suction it and take a look
at what's going on under a microscope

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and you can also in parallel

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you can measure using spatial
transcriptomics or spatial proteomics

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the character of each individual cell
that's within that slide,

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and also if your panel is enriched
for ligand receptor mechanisms,

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you can get very, very detailed profiling

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of how the different cells are interacting
and communicating with one another.

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So that's what my lab specializes in.

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We started to leverage these
spatial transcriptomics techniques

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and take that data and try to generate
really good quality data

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and from that data we developed
primary source computational algorithms

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to study cell to cell communication.

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With using these data,
it gives us this beautiful window into

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how cells are talking to each other,
how they're influencing with one another,

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and also how, it sort of allows you
this bird's eye view where it's like,

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oh, it's not just this one
cell has done something deviant.

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It's that this set of cells as a whole

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has sort of lapsed into this other way
of behaving and communicating,

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and that opens the window to say, oh,
well, what could we do therapeutically?

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Could we block that shift
that we don't want to happen?

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I'm really hoping to develop
regenerative therapeutics.

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So I think that since we now have this data

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and we have these computational algorithms

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that can really teach us
what's going on within tissues,

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I'm very much hoping to be able
to develop therapies that can sort of,

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help disease tissues
to regenerate themselves,

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that we could give safely and that we know
very clearly, or we have a strong,

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you know, ability to predict how these,

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therapeutics are going to influence
these communities of cells

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so that we can, you know, steer
disease tissues back to homeostasis.