Autophagy in Health and Disease

Bev Rothermel, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, TX, with appointments in the Departments of Internal Medicine (Cardiology) and Molecular Biology. Her laboratory was directly involved in some of the first studies demonstrating the dual nature of autophagy in the cardiovascular system. She has lectured on the role of autophagy in human disease for more than ten years as a component of the graduate school's Integrative Biology program. Current studies in her lab seek to understand circadian regulation of cardiac mitophagy as well as identify the causes and consequences of suppressed autophagy in Down syndrome. Her research is supported by the National Institutes of Health's INCLUDE Project, the Wellstone Muscular Dystrophy Research Network, and the American Heart Association. Abhinav Diwan, MBBS, is a physician-scientist and a board-certified cardiologist, and directs a laboratory-based research program focused on basic and translational studies to therapeutically target the autophagy-lysosome pathway in human disease. He is Professor of Medicine, Cell Biology and Physiology, and Obstetrics and Gynecology at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri, USA and Staff Physician at the John Cochran Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Saint Louis. Studies from his laboratory have uncovered evidence for acquired lysosome dysfunction as a common cellular in cardiomyopathy and heart failure, Alzheimer's disease and diabetes. Translational research from his program has established the autophagy-lysosome pathway as a viable therapeutic target, with activation of the lysosome biogenesis program as an exciting strategy in these conditions. He has also proven to be an outstanding mentor to the next generation of physician-scientists, an effort he leads as the program director of the Investigator Training Pathway in the Cardiovascular Division supported by a NIH T32 training grant.