Tara DeSilva
University of Alabama, USA
Biography
Tara DeSilva, Assistant Professor, recently joined the faculty at the University of Alabama at Birmingham after her postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital Boston. The research in Dr. DeSilva’s laboratory focuses on understanding demyelinating diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis and Transverse Myelitis. Dr. DeSilva’s research has been awarded grants from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. The goal of Dr. DeSilva’s research is to understand 1) how activity-dependent mechanisms stimulate glutamatergic signaling between axons and oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs) to turn on transcriptional programs necessary for myelination; and 2) how immune cell infl ammatory mediators prevent newly proliferated OPCs, as a consequence of neuroinfl ammation, from forming normal mature myelin. The goal of these studies is to understand how to reprogram newly proliferated OPCs to remyelinate, which has important implications in neural regeneration in demyelinating diseases like multiple sclerosis as well as neurodegenerative diseases. To elucidate these mechanisms Dr. DeSilva’s laboratory uses conditional knockout mice in developmental models of myelination, animal models of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis, and co-culture models of immune cells and glia cells.
Abstract
Abstract : Inhibition of system Xc- transporter attenuates autoimmune infl ammatory demyelination