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Miriam Adler, PhD – Hebrew University – “Principles of wound healing and fibrosis: A circuit-to-target approach to reduce fibrosis”
December 18, 2023 @ 10:00 am - 11:00 am
ABC Seminar Series
Speaker: Miriam Adler, PhD
Speaker Affiliation: Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences and the Faculty of Medicine, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Speaker Position: Senior Lecturer
Hosted by: Utkarsh Sharma, Gibson Lab
Fibrosis is a pathology of excessive scarring which causes morbidity and mortality worldwide. Fibrosis is a complex process involving thousands of factors, therefore, to better understand fibrosis and develop new therapeutic approaches, it is necessary to simplify and clarify the underlying concepts. In this talk, I will introduce a mathematical model we recently developed for a cell circuit between myofibroblasts and macrophages – the two cell types that produce and remodel the scar. The mathematical framework predicts two types of fibrosis – hot fibrosis with abundant macrophages and myofibroblasts, and cold fibrosis dominated by myofibroblasts alone. Moreover, we use the model to predict that the autocrine signal for myofibroblast division is a potential therapeutic target to reduce fibrosis. Finally, I will discuss how we use myocardial infarction (MI), a widely studied in-vivo injury model for cardiac fibrosis, to test these theoretical concepts and intervention strategies experimentally.
Research Links: https://adlermiri.wixsite.com/mysite Google Scholar
Miri Adler completed a BSc in Physics at the Technion and obtained an MSc and a PhD in Physics at the Weizmann Institute with Prof. Uri Alon, studying design principles of biological circuits. In her postdoctoral research working jointly with Prof. Ruslan Medzhitov at Yale University and Prof. Aviv Regev at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Miri developed theoretical frameworks to uncover universal principles of the collective behavior of cells at the tissue level. Miri received a Fulbright scholarship, EMBO postdoctoral scholarship, Zuckerman STEM leadership program fellowship, and the Israel National Postdoctoral Award Program for Advancing Women in Science. Currently she is an associate research scientist at the Tananbaum Center for Theoretical and Analytical Human Biology at Yale University. As of December, she will be a senior lecturer at the Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences and the Faculty of Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.