Topic Overview:

Scott’s lab focuses on innate immune responses to trauma, hemorrhagic shock, and other types of sterile (noninfectious) injury. Professional immune cells, such as macrophages and neutrophils, are well known to be important initiators of inflammatory responses to injury, but Scott has an interest in determining how other cells types, such as hepatocytes, contribute to and regulate inflammation under these conditions. The inflammasome is an intracellular platform of proteins that when activated in immune cells leads to the release of important proinflammatory cytokines. Scott and colleagues recently determined that hepatocytes also activate the inflammasome, although this activation has an alternative function in hepatocytes to induce protective intracellular pathways. Scott will detail some more recent evidence regarding which elements of the inflammasome are important in the hepatoprotective responses and also some of the mechanisms that might be involved in inflammasome activation in these cells.