Twelve Carle Illinois College of Medicine (CI MED) researchers have been chosen as part of the inaugural group of investigators probing the role of inflammation and the function of the immune system in disease, including one CI MED-based team examining inflammation’s role in female reproductive disorders.
The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago was announced in 2023 to leverage the expertise of researchers from a range of disciplines to develop technologies capable of making precise, molecular-level measurements of biological processes within human tissues. The longer-range goal is understanding and treating the inflammatory states that underlie many diseases.
A multidisciplinary team co-led by CI MED Professor Amy Wagoner Johnson will explore inflammation’s role in problems in the female reproductive system. “Inflammation is common to many diseases affecting only females or predominantly females. This project, which was awarded $900,000 in funding over three years, will spatially image interactions between inflammation, estrogen, and extracellular matrix (ECM) changes in female reproductive tissues using multimodel MR (magnetic resonance) imaging,” Wagoner Johnson said.
“Inflammation can lead to extracellular matrix changes, like fibrosis, which can affect tissue and organ function (e.g., fertility, pregnancy). We expect that this work will help to illuminate fundamental interactions between inflammation, ECM, and estrogen by providing a spatial map of temporal changes, which we will couple with more traditional readouts of gene and protein expression. “
“The last layer of the project will allow us to specifically examine the influence of propylparaben, a chemical preservative widely found in various daily-use products, on the interactions or intersections between estrogen-inflammation-ECM,” Wagoner Johnson said. Because the team is using MRI, there is potential for translating their work to clinical applications.
Wagoner Johnson’s expertise focuses on mechanics and imaging of ECM and reproductive tissues. Her team includes fellow investigators and collaborators with complementary expertise, including imaging scientists Bruce Damon (of CI MED and the Carle Illinois Advanced Imaging Center) and Brad Sutton – who is also a CI MED Health Innovation Professor; reproductive scientists Indrani Bagchi*and Ayelet Ziv-Gal; and Andrew Smith, who develops biotechnologies for disease detection and monitoring.
Other investigators will contribute their expertise on different projects:
- “As one of the CZI investigators and the PI of the project, “Cellular contractility and mechanotransduction in the neuroinflammatory response,” alongside co-PIs Qian Chen and Hyun Joon Kong, we will develop a novel instrumented neurovascular tissue platform with embedded force sensors, integrated with fluorescent microscopy and electron microscopy techniques, to study the biophysics of neuroinflammation at the tissue level with unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution. These measurements will enable novel explorations of the mechanobiology of neuroinflammation which have never been considered before, and potentially help identify new therapeutic targets for neuroinflammation,” said Taher Saif.
- “Our new CZI Biohub project brings together the Kelleher group, a leading proteomics group from Northwestern, and my group’s single-cell expertise to create new tools to study the molecular changes occurring in individual cells during the inflammatory process—information not currently available,” said Jonathan Sweedler.
In all, the inaugural CZ Biohub Investigators group includes 48 researchers from various departments at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago.
“The CZ Biohub Chicago is focused on high-risk, high-reward research, and the selection of these 16 Illinois investigators—from so many colleges and institutes across the university—underscores the breadth of research excellence on our campus," said Susan Martinis, the vice chancellor for research and innovation at Illinois.
U. of I. colleges and research institutes represented in the Biohub cohort include Carle Illinois College of Medicine, The Grainger College of Engineering, the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, the College of Veterinary Medicine, the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, the Cancer Center at Illinois, the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
The following Illinois researchers are part of the inaugural cohort of Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago Investigators.
- Indrani Bagchi*
- Rohit Bhargava*
- Qian Chen*
- Martha Gillette*
- Bumsoo Han
- Amy Wagoner Johnson*
- Auinash Kalsotra
- Hyunjoon Kong*
- Catherine Murphy*
- M. Taher Saif*
- Mei Shen
- Shannon Sirk*
- Brad Sutton*
- Jonathan Sweedler*
- Yurii Vlasov*
- Ayelet Ziv-Gal
*Denotes CZ Biohub Chicago Investigators affiliated with CI MED.
Editor's note: See the original announcement from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation here.
See also this article by The Cancer Center at Illinois.