The February 28, 2019 Department of Internal Medicine’s Medical Grand Rounds, “Therapeutic Insights from Integrin Knockout Mice” was presented by Dean Sheppard, MD, professor of medicine; chief, Pulmonary, Critical Care, Allergy and Sleep and director, Lung Biology Center at University of California, San Francisco and fellowship research mentor to Yale School of Medicine’s Naftali Kaminski, MD, Boehringer-Ingelheim Endowed Professor of Internal Medicine and chief of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine.
Sheppard started his talk with the explanation of integrins, or linked polypeptide chains that facilitate interactions between cells.
“My lab has not been so interested in the conserved function of integrins, there are many labs that do so, including some at Yale, that study the conserved functions very well,” said Sheppard. “But we have been interested in what is different in the non-conserved regions, that is partly because I am a physician and I am interested in how these integrins might participate in processes that lead to disease.”
He highlighted how integrins expressed in the lung contribute to lung disease and how certain integrins such as aVB6 or aVB1 can activate TGFβ, a key regulator of lung response to injury and scarring. His lab’s work on integrins in different cell types and using knockout mice led to years of research and potential therapeutic interventions for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) that are currently in clinical trials, and to novel therapeutic targets in severe asthma.
The goal of Sheppard’s talk was to “encourage physicians in general to think about studying big, important families of proteins that might play a role in disease. This is one of the ways that we can come to new therapeutic insights that we would never get just trying to predict in advance how are we going to treat asthma or IPF. If that is all we set out to do in the beginning, we wouldn’t have found either of these two strategies.”
To learn more about Sheppard’s work and watch yesterday’s Medical Grand Rounds, Yale faculty can review the video.
To learn more about pulmonary research at Yale, visit Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine.