PATH 7901 - Special Topics: Vascular and Inflammatory Cell Biology

Vascular biology encompasses all aspects of cell biology, adhesion protein function, signaling cascades, and transcriptional regulation that initiates and extends the inflammatory response. The inflammatory response is an ideal system for studying these events as the system is constitutively in a quiescent state, but within a few minutes completely changes its phenotype to one dominated by cell-cell interactions, adhesion, migration, and markedly changed transcription and translation. This course covers the early history that still defines the inflammatory response, the cell types that constitute the response, the role of integrin and selectin adhesion proteins responsible for directed migration, the cytokines and autocoids that initiate and coordinate the process, and transcriptional regulation of inflammatory genes. The course examines how these responses are currently thought to work in pathophysiologic processes such as asthma, sepsis, and cardiovascular disease.