Andrew Wang's Lab

Transcript

• 00:00Six years ago, my wife calls me in a panic.
• 00:04She had taken the kids to a
• 00:06local pick your own orchard.
• 00:08My oldest son had started developing
• 00:10swelling around the lips and in the tongue,
• 00:12which are signs of a
• 00:15severe allergic reaction.
• 00:16It's for this reason that I really
• 00:18want to understand how one develops
• 00:20an immune reaction to something
• 00:21that is harmless, like food.
• 00:24Allergic diseases and autoimmune
• 00:25diseases have been exponentially
• 00:27increasing since 1950.
• 00:28My group is deeply interested in
• 00:30trying to understand why so many
• 00:32more people now have autoimmune
• 00:34diseases and allergic diseases.
• 00:35We were trying to think about
• 00:37what exactly was different
• 00:39about the modern environment.
• 00:41What came to the top of the list for us
• 00:43was the amount of psychological stress
• 00:46that the modern environment imposes on us,
• 00:49its effect on sleep.
• 00:50And then the types of foods that we eat,
• 00:54in particular processed foods.
• 00:57When we published our acute stress
• 00:58story a couple of years ago,
• 01:00a lot of patients felt very validated
• 01:02that what they were experiencing,
• 01:03there was kind of some explanation for.
• 01:05It also opened up new therapeutic
• 01:07avenues because it turns out
• 01:09that the stress factor that we
• 01:10found is an immune signal and we
• 01:12currently have drugs to
• 01:13neutralize that immune signal.
• 01:15And so it also opened up new
• 01:17therapeutic possibilities.
• 01:17My lab is a little funky.
• 01:19Everybody has projects that
• 01:20they themselves picked.
• 01:21It's a little bit more kind
• 01:23of like a think tank than
• 01:24a standard academic lab.
• 01:26But I think this keeps
• 01:27us nimble and personally engaged
• 01:28in the work that we're doing.
• 01:31We hope that the work that we do in
• 01:33my laboratory will one day validate
• 01:36patients and their experiences,
• 01:38empower them and their lifestyle choices
• 01:40and then offer new medicines that could
• 01:42help them in their diseases.