Osher Lifelong Learning Institute
Inflammation and Stress-Related Diseases
Speaker
Professor Michael Karin
Coordinator
Steve Clarey
Inflammation is a tightly regulated host-defense response to acute cellular stresses, such as physical injury and infection. One important molecule in this process is the inflammasome NLRP3, which assembles with the proper cellular stress signals but is inactive in healthy cells. However, excessive or altered regulation of NLRP3 activity results in chronic inflammation and is related to the pathogenesis of inflammatory, autoimmune, and degenerative diseases such as lupus, gout, osteoarthritis, fatty liver disease, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes mellitus, and autism. This lecture will review some of these important stress and inflammation-responsive pathways to human diseases.
Speaker Bio
Presenter: Michael Karin is the Director of the Center for Metabolic and Liver Diseases at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute. Previously, he was a Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology at the UC San Diego School of Medicine. He is a member of the National Academies of Sciences and Medicine and fellow of the American Association for Cancer Research Academy, and he has served as. Member of the National Advisory Council for Environmental Health Sciences. He received a BS in Biology from Tel Aviv University and a PhD in Molecular Biology from UCLA.
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