Research Opportunities

Hibernation confers extraordinary protection against various forms of stress and insults that would be life-threatening to non-hibernators. However, the mechanisms of such promising protection remain elusive, hindering potential therapeutic applications. One of the hallmarks of hibernation is metabolic regulation, exemplified by modifications in mitochondrial respiration throughout the different stages of hibernation. Nonetheless, the possible link between metabolic regulation and cellular protection is unclear.  This project aims to study the mitochondrial regulations and their roles in metabolic adaptation during hibernation, in the context of neuroprotection.

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is one of the leading causes of blindness among the elderly affecting over 30 million individuals world-wide. AMD initiates in the back of the eye because of dysfunctions in the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), a monolayer of cells that maintains vision through maintenance of photoreceptor healthy and integrity. AMD can lead to severe vision loss and blindness in advanced stages – “dry” and “wet” forms. In the dry stage, the death of RPE cells triggers photoreceptor cell death and atrophy of the choroidal blood supply causing vision loss. It is thought that RPE cell death in AMD is triggered by the formation of sub-RPE protein/lipid deposits called drusen. Our recent work shows that drusen formation is initiated by reduced autophagic flux in RPE cells resulting in reduced ability of RPE cells to process intracellular “debris” that eventually gets secreted as drusen deposits. TFEB, a member of MiT family of transcription factors is a known master regulator of autophagy. Here, we propose to investigate the activity of transcription factor TEFB in our AMD cellular models of iPSC-derived RPE cells. We hypothesize that autophagy downregulation is triggered by post-translational changes in TFEB that affect its sub-cellular localization and reduce its transcriptional activity. Here, we propose to identify those changes in TEFB and discover signaling pathways that lead to its altered activity. Lastly, we will test the ability of our recently discovered FDA-approved drugs that stimulate TEFB activity to reduce drusen formation by increasing autophagy in iPSC-RPE AMD models. This work will lead to a better understanding of AMD pathogenesis and potentially retool existing  drugs to treat AMD patients.

In order to maintain homeostasis in response to environmental changes such as nutrient availability, eukaryotic cells have evolved intricate mechanisms to quickly increase or decrease the activity of fundamental processes such as gene expression, protein expression and degradation. Indeed, several metabolites act as cofactors for important cellular enzymes that regulate e.g. chromatin state and serve as templates for posttranslational modifications flagging proteins for proteolysis via the ubiquitin-proteasome system. Consequently, the identification of metabolites and complementary binding domains has broadened our understanding of human physiology and contributed to the development of new medicines to treat malignant and inflammatory disease. The aim of this project is to systematically map protein-metabolite interactions on a proteome-wide scale by combining the development of specific metabolite-inspired affinity reagents with unbiased approaches such as thermal profiling to dissect metabolite signalling in the context of protein degradation pathways in various cell types. Applicants will have the opportunity to take advantage of a unique combination of synthetic organic chemistry and cell biology techniques to identify new potential drug targets and develop first-in-class ligands for key regulators of protein homeostasis.