Dr. Jonathan H. Axelrod. is group leader at the Gene Therapy Institute. Dr. Axelrod have explored the wiles of interleukin-6 (IL-6) in its many roles within processes of tissue injury, repair, and regeneration.
Is work initially focused on processes of liver injury and regeneration where he used IL-6 as a tool to understand how, in acute hepatic failure, IL-6 promotes metabolic equilibrium and liver regeneration, and, in chronic liver injury, how IL-6 alternatively functions to protect against liver cancer and at times paradoxically serves to promote liver cancer.
Indeed, the pleiotropic and often contradictory functions of IL-6 became apparent in most of the models of tissue injury that he explored. He discovered that neutrophils mediate acute kidney injury and that while IL-6 plays a crucial role in this process, surprisingly, prior exposure to IL-6 signaling via its soluble receptor prevents kidney injury.
Similarly, he discovered that cellular senescence drives loss of salivary gland function in mice and in human patients following radiotherapy and that IL-6 is crucial in mediating this, but that - again paradoxically - prior exposure to IL-6 ameliorates loss-of-function by promoting DNA damage repair.
One of the most striking revelations of his findings has been the frequency of which the role of IL-6 in cellular senescence was revealed to be a crucial factor in pathological processes. Dr. Axelrod is now focusing on studying why IL-6/STAT3 signaling in the liver is needed to prevent mature-onset obesity, to reveal the fate of senescent hepatocytes during hepatocarcinogenesis occurring on a background of chronic hepatitis, and to discover new pharmaceuticals that promote resolution of liver fibrosis via upregulation of microRNAs.