May 15, 2020
Chief Academic Officer at Beth Israel Lahey Health, Dr. Gyongyi
Szabo, joins the show to discuss her research on the role of
inflammation in innate immunity and
liver disease.
In this episode, you will learn:
For nearly 20 years, Dr. Szabo has been studying innate
immunity, innate cell function, and signal transduction
pathways.
The focus in her lab is on various types of liver diseases that
have an inflammatory component, which accounts for almost all liver
injuries and chronic liver diseases.
The goal of her research is to gain a better understanding of what
causes the inflammatory response in certain
liver diseases with the hopes of intervening with certain
medications or treatments that would benefit patients suffering
from liver disease.
She discusses the difference between innate and adaptive responses of the immune system, how the evolutionary-preserved pattern-recognition receptors that are normally activated by pathogens can also recognize damage-associated molecular patterns, thus leading to low-level systemic inflammation, in what ways her research might lead to an effective treatment for alcohol-related liver disease, and more.