What do we study?

We are fundamentally interested in the complex cellular and molecular interactions that take place during joint homeostasis and disease. We broadly refer to these interactions as ‘crosstalk’.

Our primary focus is osteoarthritis (OA), a painful, debilitating joint disease that afflicts over half a billion people worldwide. OA is a highly complex disease that affects all the tissues of the joint organ, and we now appreciate its considerable systemic impacts too. Hence why our emphasis on crosstalk is so essential. We are also interested in the links between OA and associated musculoskeletal and metabolic diseases including inflammatory arthritis, bone fracture, obesity, and metabolic syndrome.

Themes
Studies in our laboratory revolve around three key themes that are pertinent to joint disease:

• Inflammation
• Fibrosis
• Mineralization

In particular, we want to understand how Wnt/β-catenin signaling functions as a unifying node that governs the intersection of these key aspects of joint disease.

Approaches
We employ a diverse range of approaches in our basic-translational laboratory, to probe questions nested in molecular biology, immunology, cell biology, and physiology.