On March 25th, 2024 at 4 pm
Speaker: Professor Steven Boeynaems, Assistant Professor in Molecular & Human Genetics; Baylor College of Medicine - Texas Children's Hospital; Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute, Houston, TX, USA
Local: Anfiteatro INFAR (R 3 de maio, 100) , Escola Paulista de Medicina - UNIFESP
Speaker further information:
The overall focus of our lab is to understand one of the most basic questions in biology: how do cells perceive and deal with stress? Stress is a universal feature of all cellular Life. Whether it concerns abiotic (e.g., temperature) or biotic (e.g., viral infection) stress, cells/organisms need to adapt to their ever-changing environment. Protein aggregation is a hallmark of a stressed cell, so how do cells protect themselves? It is becoming increasingly clear that cells undergo broad (reversible) spatial and biophysical rearrangements of their entire proteome in times of stress, yet the regulatory and organizational principles remain almost completely unresolved. Biomolecular condensates (BMCs) have emerged as key stress-responsive compartments, and our work has indeed shown that such assemblies allow cells to sense and respond to stress.
Protein aggregation and the stress response are intimately tied to human disease. They span a large range - from age-related stresses or exposure to environmental/physical stresses in neurodegenerative disease, the cellular stress caused by hypoxia and chemotherapy in the tumor microenvironment to the corruption of the host proteostatic machinery in infectious disease. Stress and the associated responses modulate the onset and progression of virtually every human disease. It therefore may come as no surprise that defects in BMCs are associated with several human diseases and the aging process. Yet, we still have a very limited understanding whether such BMC alterations are adaptive or actually driving dysfunction, and whether we can drug them. Our lab addresses this open question by using a multidisciplinary approach—spanning biophysics to in vivo modelling and drug screening—combined with orthogonal model systems and a synthetic biology tool kit to untangle how the biophysical stress response is regulated and to engineer new tools to therapeutically target it in aging and human disease.
We mostly focus on neurodegenerative diseases and brain cancer, but understand that the same molecular processes underlying these conditions are not exclusively limited to humans. Indeed, evolution has already found solutions to many of the problems we face in human medicine today. For example, while the aging human brain is incredibly susceptible to protein aggregation, other organisms seem to defy the biological limits of life and are able to maintain proteostasis in the harshest of environments. It is therefore that we are teaming up with collaborators from around the world to study stress-tolerant organisms to understand the molecular underpinnings of their resilience. Figuring out how these organisms prevent proteins from aggregating will highlight new strategies to boost proteostasis in protein aggregation diseases. In all, a multi-model and evolution-inspired approach forms the backbone of our lab. By repurposing Nature’s ingenuity, we develop innovative bio-synthetic and -mimetic tools and drugs to combat disease.
Specific areas of research (see also: Lab page.)