The Phospholipids Conference: Dynamic Lipid Signaling in Health and Disease

Rob Stahelin’s interdisciplinary research focus on biological membranes has revealed them as signaling and trafficking platforms for processes fundamental to life. Biomembranes harbor receptors, ion channels, lipid domains, lipid signals, and scaffolding complexes which function to maintain cellular growth, metabolism, and homeostasis. Moreover, abnormalities in lipid metabolism attributed to genetic changes among other causes are often associated with diseases such as cancer, arthritis, and diabetes. Thus, there is a need to comprehensively understand molecular events occurring within and on membranes as a means of grasping disease etiology and identifying viable targets for drug development. As there is still a paucity of predictive data for peripheral protein function, these enzymes or structural proteins are often rigorously studied to characterize their lipid-dependent properties. His research is targeted at identifying human and viral protein drug targets, designing predictive functions for this class of proteins, and understanding their biological mechanisms of activation and function as a means of creating better therapies. 

Isabel Merida is a Senior Spanish Research Council (CSIC) Researcher and Professor at the Spanish National Center for Biotechnology. Merida’s lab studies the role of diacylglycerol kinases in the control of immune response and cancer progression. Highly transformed solid tumors acquire invasive features and the ability to escape from antitumor immunity. The therapies that help to overcome immune evasion by tumors are an important new strategy for cancer treatment. Her research team studies the molecular mechanisms by which tumors couple the development of malignant traits to the impairment of T cell responses. Their work showed that diacylglycerol metabolism by two enzymes of the diacylglycerol kinase (DGK) family limit T cell responses. She and her team are delimiting the contribution of diacylglycerol kinases to T cell functions and oncogenic transformation. Targeting these enzymes, alone or in combination with other inhibitors in wide clinical use, could help in the treatment of aggressive forms of cancer.

Merida received her BS in Chemistry in 1984 and her PhD in Biochemistry in 1987 from the Madrid Complutense University in Spain. She trained as a researcher in the United States working in Michael Czech’s laboratory at the UMass Medical School. She then joined the laboratory of Glen Gaulton in the Division of Immunology at the University of Pennsylvania as a fellow of the Spanish Ministry of Science and later as a Leukemia Society Special Fellow. In 1993 she returned to Spain and joined the then-newly created Spanish National Center for Biotechnology as a Junior scientist for the Spanish Research Council. 

Amy Kiger and her research team are investigating membrane regulation of dynamic cell organization and shape. Cells must continuously maintain integrity and compartmentalization with changes in cell size and shape that occur in development, immunity, aging, and disease. How cellular spatiotemporal organization is achieved with remodeling is therefore a fundamental problem of broad significance.

Her laboratory team is studying central roles for novel membrane trafficking processes, under control of spatiotemporal lipid regulation, that coordinate dynamic cell structure. Using a foundation in genetic and cell biology experiments in the fruit fly, Drosophila, they are linking specific lipid kinase and phosphatase activities to cell remodeling. Their work aims to identify conserved mechanisms of membrane regulation in immune and muscle cell functions and provide insights into related human diseases.

Her team is currently focused in three major areas: the roles for phosphoinositide lipid regulation in cellular remodeling; the roles for autophagy in cellular remodeling; and systems-biology approaches to understanding cellular remodeling. To address these problems, they are investigating questions specific to the dynamic organization of two distinct cell types, immune cells and muscle cells. The different elaborated morphologies and functions of immune cells and muscle cells are helping them to illuminate both broadly conserved and tissue-specific requirements in cellular remodeling.

Kiger received her PhD as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Predoctoral Fellow from the Department of Developmental Biology at Stanford School of Medicine. She followed that with postdoctoral studies in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School as a Fellow of the Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research. 

Kiger has been awarded fellowships from The David & Lucille Packard Foundation, The Sidney Kimmel Foundation for Cancer Research, The March of Dimes, and The Hellman Family Foundation as well as grants from the agencies Human Frontier Science Program and National Institutes of Health.
 

Ray Blind is an Assistant Professor of Medicine, Biochemistry and Pharmacology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and School of Medicine. The Blind Lab studies second messenger signaling in the nucleus. Currently, their research is focused on determining how inositides regulate nuclear receptors, chromatin and gene expression. They integrate structural biology, genomics, drug discovery and chemical genetics to understand how nuclear small molecules operate. Blind has a long history of providing outreach and support for educational justice efforts, as well as opportunities for historically underappreciated people. Included among those opportunities is a teaching postdoc at Muhimbili University in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.