Research / Clinical
Summary
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Gabriel Haddad, MD
Professor and Chair, Pediatrics
Cancer Biology Program
Contact by Email
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Diseases/Research Topics
Apoptosis, Asthma, Hypercapnia, Hypoxia, Ischemia, Cystic Fibrosis
The overall interest of Dr. Haddad's laboratory is the effect of low oxygen or hypoxia on cell function and development. It is apparent that some mammalian tissues are extremely sensitive to the stress of hypoxia and can only survive for very short periods of time, depending on the severity or duration of the hypoxic exposure.
Basically, they are interested in the molecular mechanisms that underlie susceptibility to injury, especially that of nerve cells or neurons. Alternatively, they are also interested in the ability of cells and tissues to survive, i.e., be tolerant to, the hypoxic insult. Therefore, to examine the adaptative and maladaptive mechanisms that underlie hypoxic tolerance and hypoxia susceptibility, respectively, they have resorted to the study of mice and the use of molecular biologic techniques.
Additionally, a strong component of Haddad's research paradigm is the use of an invertebrate model, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. There are several advantages to utilizing the fruit fly in the study of the effects of hypoxia. This organism is a well studied genetic model that has a generation time of 10 days, a small number of chromosomes, and as mentioned above, a high tolerance to anoxia (complete lack of oxygen). In addition, the fruit fly represents a simple system with strong evolutionary conservation to the mammalian genome and a vast collection of mutations is available which renders this model amenable to studies in physiology, molecular biology and genetics.
This program is related to cancer biology and genetics in that they are very much interested in angiogenesis and the effect of hypoxia on the cell cycle, proliferation and apoptosis. They have shown, for example, that cells arrest their division during hypoxia; in addition hypoxia seems to increase the probability of stem cells undifferentiated state.
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