INFECTIONCANCER · Identifying genetic and microbial factors that promote intestinal inflammation and cancer using Drosophila

My long term goal is to establish a network of bacterial factors and the host signalling pathways they modulate in wild type and mutated intestinal cells that predispose for inflammation and cancer. The work of my future team will ultimately lead to a deeper understanding of critical aspects of intestinal human disease, including inflammatory bowel disease and the intestinal tumor formation and metastasis. To rapidly assess numerous combinations of inflammatory and anti-inflammatory host genes, bacterial species and their excreted factors we will use in this proposal Drosophila genetics and transcriptome analysis, chemical treatments and microbiological assays to identify the host and microbial factors that mediate inflammation and predispose for cancer using Drosophila. Despite the physiological divergence that exists between vertebrates and insects, modelling of human diseases is possible because of the high degree of conservation between Drosophila and mammalian signalling pathways controlling inflammation and infection.