We seek to understand how tissues sense and respond to damage with the long-term goal of developing novel treatments for diverse human diseases. To this end, our lab pursues parallel aims of tool development, biological discovery, and therapeutic innovation. We work to build tools for high-throughput investigation of organismal processes by developing novel methods for transgene delivery and genome-wide CRISPR screening directly within a living organism. We then implement these tools to uncover the genetic regulation of organ injury and repair across tissues. We exploit the mammalian liver, which has the unique ability to completely regenerate itself after injury, in order to identify the molecular requirements for regeneration in mammalian tissues. We then turn to non-regenerative organs such as the heart and pancreas in order to identify and surmount barriers to regeneration in those tissues. In time, we aspire to leverage this molecular understanding of organ injury and repair to modulate cellular proliferation and organ regeneration in diseases ranging from organ degeneration to cancer.
