Mark Hwang
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Ankylosing spondylitis is a form of chronic inflammatory arthritis that attacks the spine and the joints linking the pelvis to the spine, affecting roughly one in two hundred Americans and often causing disability and lost work. Its course varies enormously: some patients develop only limited joint damage, while others progress to a fully fused, rigid spine.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Microbiology & Immunology
Genetics
- Topics
ankylosing spondylitis
axial spondyloarthritis
inflammatory arthritis
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2029
What they work on
- Characterize transcriptomic signatures linked to spinal disease progression in ankylosing spondylitis using next-generation bulk and single-cell RNA sequencing of patients' peripheral blood.
- Profile serum from ankylosing spondylitis patients with known 15-year spinal progression trajectories using high-throughput proteomics to identify protein biomarkers of severe disease.
- Build prediction models of severe spinal disease risk by integrating clinical, genetic, gene expression and proteomic datasets with Bayesian multivariable modeling.
- Determine whether blood molecular markers add prognostic value beyond clinical variables, which previously discriminated poorly among the four identified spinal progression endotypes.
More about the research
Because new bone growth cannot be reversed, the clinically urgent question is who will get severe spinal disease, and standard clinical measures predict this poorly. This project looks for molecular signals in blood that can flag high-risk patients early.
Why it matters
Spinal fusion in ankylosing spondylitis is irreversible, so treatment decisions must be made before damage occurs. A blood-based prognostic tool could identify patients headed for severe spinal disease early enough to intervene, and could also make clinical trials of spine-protective treatments feasible by enrolling the patients most likely to progress. The molecular signatures found may also point toward how abnormal bone formation in this disease begins.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Kathryn Torok
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Identify cell-specific gene activity signatures and their spatial relationships in skin from children with jSSc and jLS versus healthy controls, using single-cell RNA sequencing and spatial transcriptomics.
Robert Winchester
Columbia University, NY·Microbiology & Immunology
Test whether immune checkpoint inhibitors convert PD-1+ tissue-resident memory (TRM) T cells in osteoarthritic joints into inflammatory effector T cells, using a longitudinal patient study that traces T-cell receptor (TCR) clonotypes as lineage barcodes.
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
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston: 25 labs on PI Pages, $419M a year on research, 340 research doctorates a year.
More about University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
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