Brett Shook
George Washington University, DC·Biology
Healing a wound takes careful conversation between cells that already live in the skin and immune cells that rush in after injury. Much of that conversation has been mapped for proteins such as cytokines and growth factors, but far less is known about the role of fats as signals.
- Fields
Biology
Microbiology & Immunology
Pharmacology
- Topics
wound healing
skin repair
medium-chain fatty acids
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2028
What they work on
- Determine how GPR84 signaling, a receptor for medium-chain fatty acids, controls macrophage numbers and subsequent tissue repair after skin injury, using mouse wounding models.
- Define how medium-chain fatty acids acting through GPR84 directly change the behavior of myeloid immune cells during skin wound healing.
- Establish what GPR84 signaling in skin epithelial cells contributes to keratinocyte function after injury.
- Link injury-induced fat breakdown in dermal adipocytes to the inflammatory response by tracing medium-chain fatty acid levels and interrogating single-cell gene expression datasets from wounds.
More about the research
This matters because treatments aimed at the growth phase of skin repair have done little for chronic, non-healing wounds, which are increasingly common in people with diabetes and in older adults. This project focuses on a fat-sensing receptor as a possible lever on the earliest inflammatory stage of repair.
Why it matters
Chronic, non-healing skin wounds are a major burden for people with diabetes and for older adults, and current growth-factor and cytokine therapies have helped little. Mapping how medium-chain fatty acids act through the GPR84 receptor to sustain wound macrophages could identify a druggable pathway for tuning inflammation, and GPR84 activators or blockers already exist as experimental tools, which may eventually inform new approaches to treating wounds that fail to close.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Qing Lin
Ohio State University, OH·Microbiology & Immunology
Test whether turning Mrgprb2 signaling, a mast-cell surface receptor pathway, up or down changes skin scarring and regeneration, using gene-modified mouse lines in wound healing models.
Yuxuan Miao
University of Chicago, IL·Microbiology & Immunology
Use in vivo CRISPR screens and stem cell interactome sensors in mouse skin to find how epithelial stem cells remodel nearby immune cells into a temporary protective niche after wounding.
Jessica Turnier
University of Michigan, MI·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Identify skin and blood gene expression signatures that predict treatment response in juvenile dermatomyositis, using non-invasive skin sampling of lesional and non-lesional skin in a longitudinal patient cohort.
The school
George Washington University: 13 labs on PI Pages, $382M a year on research, 225 research doctorates a year.
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