The overall focus of my research program has been to understand the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying tissue growth and tissue regeneration with the long-term goal of developing new strategies for treating human diseases.
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The overall focus of my research program has been to understand the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying tissue growth and tissue regeneration with the long-term goal of developing new strategies for treating human diseases.
The overall focus of my research program has been to understand the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying tissue growth and tissue regeneration with the long-term goal of developing new strategies for treating human diseases. For virtually my entire career, I have been interested in understanding the roles of extracellular signals in regulating embryonic development and adult tissue homeostasis, and almost all of that effort has focused on the superfamily of secreted proteins related to transforming growth factor-ß (TGF-ß). At the time that I became interested in this group of proteins when I was a Staff Associate at the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of Embryology, thirteen members of the TGF-ß family had been described in mammals. Many of these had been shown to play important regulatory roles during embryogenesis and in adult tissues, and many had shown promise for clinical applications, particularly with respect to tissue repair and tissue regeneration. Working on the assumption that many additional family members were yet to be identified and that these would also have biological activities that could be exploited for applications in regenerative medicine, I initiated a screen for new TGF-ß family members by taking advantage of the sequence homologies among the known family members. From this screen, which we continued after I moved my laboratory to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, we identified a large number of novel TGF-ß family members that we have designated GDFs (growth/differentiation factors). Currently, the TGF-ß family in mammals encompasses over 35 distinct genes, and about one-third of these were discovered by my laboratory either solely or, in some cases, concurrently with other laboratories. Because many of these GDFs turned out to have highly tissue-specific and cell type-specific expression patterns, understanding their precise biological functions has become the focus of intensive study both by my laboratory and by many others.