T H E   N I H    C A T A L Y S T      S E P T E M B E R  –  O C T O B E R   2001

WIN-WIN SITUATION: NEW FOGARTY SCHOLAR
BRINGS TRANSPORTING RESEARCH AND NEW FAES COURSE TO NIH

 

 

Win Arias

Come the spring, postdocs interested in improving their understanding of the clinical and pathological aspects of their work will have a new course in pathobiology to round out their FAES selections, thanks to the anticipated work of Irwin (Win) Arias, professor and chair of physiology at Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston.

On October 1, Arias begins a nine-month stay here as a Fogarty Scholar, and a major part of his agenda is to establish an intramural course on pathobiology for PhD students and postdocs that will "demystify medicine" and bridge what has become a widening gap between advances in biology and their application to human disease.

The course has been taught for 16 years at Tufts, where Arias also pursues his pioneering research in the pathobiol-ogy of ATP-binding casette transporters—including members of the families of multidrug-resistance proteins—in the bile canalicular domain of the plasma membrane of hepatocytes.

During his Fogarty tenure, Arias intends to collaborate with the NICHD lab of Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz, intensifying the focus on intracellular trafficking pathways within hepatic cells using high-resolution cell imaging to track the delivery of fluorescent GFP-tagged chimeras to the apical membranes of hepatic cells and assess the effects of mutants and other perturbants.

With John Hanover’s NIDDK Laboratory of Cell Biochemistry and Biology, he will explore new techniques of energy transfer, with a focus on the movement of cholesterol within cells and the regulation of cholesterol synthesis.

And with Michael Gottesman’s NCI Laboratory of Cell Biology, he will carry out further work on the biology of anticancer drug resistance mechanisms.

Arias also expects to explore the imaging technologies of NHLBI’s Robert Balaban and their applications in the study of mutant mice.

 


 

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