Wolverine Foundation Research Team
The Wolverine Foundation has assembled a community of researchers who are working together to fulfill the foundation’s goals of defining disease mechanisms, determining impacts of MAPK8IP3 genetic variants, and discovering drug therapies. In order to accomplish these goals, researchers are using a variety of cell and animal models to assist in experimental hypothesis testing and drug discovery. Human embryonic kidney (HEK), patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), CRISPR/Cas9 modified worms, zebrafish, and mice models of patient variants are all being developed in order to assure that all avenues of research are explored. Models being created will be made available to the research community for future collaborations and experiments to continually expand research into MAPK8IP3 genetic disease.
The Wolverine Foundation is currently engaging in a variety of innovative and cutting edge initiatives to expand research into MAPK8IP3 genetic disease studies to address this issue, but we are constantly seeking out new, innovative and cutting edge research initiatives. The Wolverine Foundation (“WF”) is sponsoring the following research studies which are investigating possible treatments for the MAPK8IP3 genetic mutation.
Research teams
The Davis Lab at UMass
Dr. Davis
Dr Roger Davis
Dr. Roger J. Davis is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and is the H. Arthur Smith Professor and Chair, Program in Molecular Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He received his initial training as a student at Cambridge University. He also trained as a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation fellow with Michael P. Czech at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He subsequently joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts Medical School and was a founding member of the Program in Molecular Medicine.
Dr. Davis’ studies of signal transduction mechanisms led to the molecular cloning of the first human stress-activated MAP kinase, the cJun NH2-terminal kinase (JNK). Subsequent studies defined the molecular structure of the JNK pathway, including the identification of upstream and down-stream pathway components and scaffold proteins. This signaling pathway is activated in response to many pathological / physiological stimuli and is implicated in inflammatory diseases (e.g. arthritis), cancer, stroke, heart disease, and diabetes. The overall goal of Dr. Davis’ research is to understand the molecular basis for these diseases and to design novel therapeutic strategies.
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The Ferguson Lab at YSM
Dr. Ferguson
We are supporting Dr Shawn Ferguson, PhD Associate Professor of Cell Biology and Neuroscience at Yale on his research that will use human neurons derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) as a platform for the identification of candidate therapeutic strategies to treat disabilities arising from MAPK8IP3 deficiency. Shawn is engaging in our most concentrated protein characterization study of this mutation.
About Dr Ferguson →
PhD, Associate Professor of Cell Biology and Neuroscience. Dr. Ferguson earned his Ph.D in Neuroscience from Vanberbilt University in 2004 and subsequently pursued postdoctoral studies at Yale University. Both of these training experiences focused on specialized membrane trafficking mechanisms that support synaptic transmission between neurons.
In 2010, he established his independent laboratory in the Department of Cell Biology at Yale School of Medicine which focuses on the intersection between fundamental cell biology questions and neurological disease mechanisms He currently holds the rank of Associate Professor (tenured) and has a secondary appointment in Neuroscience.
The Chung Lab at CUIMC
Dr. Chung
We are working with Dr Wendy Chung, MD, PhD Chief, Division of Clinical Genetics, Department of Pediatrics at Columbia to help support a patient registry and natural history study collection for this mutation.
About Dr Chung →
Dr. Wendy Chung is an ABMG board certified clinical and molecular geneticist with 20 years of experience in human genetic research of monogenic and complex traits including diseases such as breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, congenital heart disease, pulmonary hypertension, inherited arrhythmias, cardiomyopathies, obesity, diabetes, congenital diaphragmatic hernias, and autism. She has extensive experience mapping and cloning genes in humans, and describing the clinical characteristics and natural history of novel genetic conditions and characterizing the spectrum of disease, and developing tailored care and treatments for rare genetic diseases.
Dr. Chung directs NIH funded research programs in human genetics of birth defects including congenital diaphragmatic hernia, congenital heart disease, and esophageal atresia, autism, neurodevelopmental disorders, pulmonary hypertension, cardiomyopathy, obesity, diabetes, and breast cancer. She leads the Precision Medicine Resource in the Irving Institute at Columbia University and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. She has authored over 450 peer reviewed papers and 75 reviews and chapters in medical texts.
CUIMC Team
Alexa Geltzeiler
About
The Gowrishankar Lab at UIC
Dr. Gowrishankar
We are sponsoring Dr. Swetha Gowrishankar Assistant Professor in the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at The College of Medicine at The University of Illinois Chicago. Her initiative is focused on evaluating efficacy of candidate compounds for rescuing lysosome defects in MAPK8ip3 KO iNeurons.
About Dr Gowrishankar →
Swetha Gowrishankar, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She is a Faculty Fellow of the Honors College and Faculty of the Graduate Program in Neuroscience, UIC. She has over fifteen years of experience investigating lysosome biology which includes her post-doctoral work studying axonal lysosome transport in the laboratories of Shawn Ferguson and HHMI Investigator Pietro De Camilli at Yale School of Medicine. She was a recipient of BrightFocus fellowship for research on Alzheimer’s disease and Cayman Woman in Research Grant. At UIC, her lab studies mechanisms underlying lysosome formation and function in neurons as well as mechanisms underlying lysosome dysfunction in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia. She addresses these questions using a multidisciplinary approach (imaging, biochemical techniques and proteomics) in mouse models of these diseases as well as iPSC-derived neurons.
The Precision Medicine Institute at UAB
Dr. Might
We are working with Dr Matt Might, PhD, Director Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute University of Alabama and his team, sponsoring zebrafish and c elegan research studies. His team will also be responsible for developing Transcriptomic profiling (RNA-sequencing) of MAPK8IP3 patient-specific iPSC-derived neurons We are intrigued and interested by Dr Matt Might’s current research in biomedical informatics.
About Dr Might →
Director, Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute and Professor, UAB School of Medicine. Dr. Might has been the Director of the Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) since 2017. At UAB, he is the Hugh Kaul Kaul Endowed Chair of Personalized Medicine, a Professor of Internal Medicine and a Professor of Computer Science. His research at UAB focuses on precision prevention, diagnosis, and therapeutics across rare disease, cancer and common/chronic conditions. A principal theme in his research is the use of computer and data science to enhance clinical and academic medicine.
From 2016 to 2018, Dr. Might was a Strategist in the Executive Office of the President in The White House. At The White House, he worked primarily on President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative with both the NIH and the Department of Veterans Affairs. In 2015, Dr. Might joined the faculty of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School as a visiting professor. At DBMI, his research focused on rare disease discovery and diagnosis, and on the development of personalized therapeutics for rare disease.
UAB Team
Dr. Crowder
About
Cammie joined UAB’s Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute as the Assistant Director of Education, Research, and Science Communication in 2020. As a senior laboratory scientist at PMI, she uses CRISPR-Cas9 mutagenesis to develop patient-guided zebrafish models of rare-genetic disorders associated with neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disease. Through her research, she aims to describe molecular mechanisms contributing to patient symptoms and complete drug screens in zebrafish models to identify potential therapeutic options that could be repurposed to treat patients. She uses research in her teaching and has developed a series of laboratory-based curriculum for UAB undergraduate programs in the areas of genetics, molecular biology, and precision medicine. Cammie is an Assistant Professor of Neurobiology at UAB Birmingham.
Prior to her current position, she was awarded an NIH Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Award (IRACDA) and completed her postdoctoral fellow at UAB examining endocrinological disease and rare-human genetic disorders in the labs of Dr. Daniel Gorelick and Dr. Matt Might. She received her PhD in 2016 from Oregon State University in Corvallis, OR. She is originally from Birmingham, AL.
Dr. Yeo
About
Dr. Yoder
About
Dr. Bradley K. Yoder is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Cell, Developmental, and Integrative Biology in the School of Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). He holds the UAB Health Science Foundation Endowed Chair in Biomedical Research and was the 2019 recipient of the Lillian Jean Kaplan International Prize for Advancement in the Understanding of Polycystic Kidney Disease. He is the Director of the NIH funded Childhood Cystic Kidney Disease Center, Co-director, with Dr. Matt Might, of the NIH funded Center for Precision Animal Modeling (C-PAM), and the Director of the Graduate Training Program in Cell, Molecular, and Developmental, Biology. He joined the faculty at UAB in 1997 after completing his postdoctoral studies at Oak Ridge National Laboratory under the guidance of Dr. Rick Woychik, where Dr. Yoder was an Alexander Hollaender Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow. He received his Ph.D. in molecular and cellular biology from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 1993.
His research focus is on the cellular and molecular mechanisms regulating assembly, maintenance, and function of the primary cilium utilizing complementary approaches in rats, mice, C. elegans, and cell culture models. Utilizing genetic screens in C. elegans, his group identified multiple proteins required for ciliogenesis and cilia mediated sensory and signaling activities and have extended these studies into mammalian systems demonstrating critical roles for the cilium in embryogenesis and for maintaining normal tissue function in adults. His studies have uncovered a novel role of neuronal cilia in regulating feeding behavior and satiation response that when disrupted leads to obesity and diabetes. His group has contributed to the identification of several new loci involved in human cilia related diseases. In summary, the research conducted by his group is providing innovative insights into how cilia are constructed and how they are established as a unique signaling and sensory structure with a distinct protein composition from the rest of the cell membrane.
Dr. Haycraft
Dr. Crouse
The Yu Lab at BCH
Dr. Yu
Dr Tim Yu, Attending Physician, Division of Genetics and Genomics, Boston Children’s Hospital and Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School, has started initial research to establish patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) based neuronal models to study the neurodevelopmental phenotype associated with MAPK8IP3 variants.
About Dr Yu →
Dr Tim Yu – MD, PhD. Dr. Tim Yu is a neurologist and researcher in the Division of Genetics and Genomics at Boston Children’s Hospital, Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His research group works at the intersection of genetics, neurobiology, and bioinformatics to explore the basis for neurologic disease and advance genomic medicine. Research interests range from large-scale computational analyses to uncover genes responsible for autism and rare pediatric neurogenetic disorders, to the application of whole genome sequencing for early detection of disease in newborns, to pioneering the development of individualized genomic medicines.
BCH Team
Dr. Demirbas
About
Megan Seferian
About
We are always eager to learn more and are constantly seeking new insights into this genetic mutation. Please send your inquiries to research@wolvfdn.com
Are you a parent or caregiver of a patient who has been diagnosed with MAPK8IP3-related genetic disorder?
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