Speaker Class C
Cell Stress, Cell Death and Inflammation: What doesn’t Kill you Makes you Stranger
Inflammation can be initiated by two main triggers: infection or severe tissue injury, both of which elicit the production of a battery of cytokines and chemokines to recruit and activate cells of the immune system. However, it is much less well appreciated that cell stress (e.g. protein misfolding, heat shock, DNA damage, hypoxia) can also trigger inflammation, but how cell stress initiates inflammation is very poorly understood at present. Chronic cell stress is suspected to play a key role in driving the damaging inflammatory responses associated with solid cancers, obesity, and neurodegenerative disease. Here, I will discuss stress-induced inflammation and argue that inflammation in this context is regulated by ‘stress-associated molecular patterns’ (SAMPs) that are expressed or activated in response to divergent cell stressors. Stress-induced upregulation and activation of Death Receptor 5/TRAIL-R2 will be discussed as a paradigm example of a SAMP that is induced by diverse forms of proteotoxic stress to drive inflammation.
Biography
Seamus Martin is the holder of the Smurfit Chair of Medical Genetics (since 1999), within the Smurfit Institute of Genetics, at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He has an international reputation in the field of programmed cell death, which plays a key role in the development and function of the immune system. He was elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 2006, to the European Molecular Biology Organisation in 2009 and has received a number of awards including The GlaxoSmithKline Prize of The Biochemical Society (UK) and The RDS Boyle Medal, Ireland's highest scientific honor. He served as President of the European Cell Death Organization (ECDO) from 2016-2018 and was awarded an ERC Advanced grant in 2021. He is an author of the 11th, 12th and 13th Editions of one of the leading Immunology textbooks ‘Roitt’s Essential Immunology’ and is Editor-in-Chief of The FEBS Journal (Cambridge, UK), since 2014. The Martin laboratory is interested in all aspects of programmed cell death, especially the links between cell death, inflammation and cancer and is supported by an ERC Advanced grant as well as Irish Research Council Advanced Laureate Award.