Publications by authors named "Will Wood"

Purpose Of Review: Dupilumab is an emerging medication that has shown efficacy for multiple atopic conditions. This review provides insight into the common conditions that are treated, mechanism of action, and continued innovation with the medication.

Recent Findings: There continues to be applicability of dupilumab in treating a growing number of atopic conditions.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: The Sydney Medically Supervised Injecting Centre provides a safe, non-judgemental space where people can inject pre-obtained substances under the supervision of trained staff. This article describes an unusual incident occurring at the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre in January 2023.

Case Presentation: Two regular male clients attending the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre injected a substance they believed to be cocaine.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Ferroptosis is a distinct form of necrotic cell death caused by overwhelming lipid peroxidation, and emerging evidence indicates a major contribution to organ damage in multiple pathologies. However, ferroptosis has not yet been visualized in vivo due to a lack of specific probes, which has severely limited the study of how the immune system interacts with ferroptotic cells and how this process contributes to inflammation. Consequently, whether ferroptosis has a physiological role has remained a key outstanding question.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Selectively labeling cells with damaged membranes is needed not only for identifying dead cells in culture, but also for imaging membrane barrier dysfunction in pathologies . Most membrane permeability stains are permanently colored or fluorescent dyes that need washing to remove their non-uptaken extracellular background and reach good image contrast. Others are DNA-binding environment-dependent fluorophores, which lack design modularity, have potential toxicity, and can only detect permeabilization of cell volumes containing a nucleus (i.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The clearance of dead and dying cells, termed efferocytosis, is a rapid and efficient process and one that is critical for organismal health. The extraordinary speed and efficiency with which dead cells are detected and engulfed by immune cells within tissues presents a challenge to researchers who wish to unravel this fascinating process, since these fleeting moments of uptake are almost impossible to catch in vivo. In recent years, the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) embryo has emerged as a powerful model to circumvent this problem.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Apoptosis is a form of regulated cell death (RCD) that involves proteases of the caspase family. Pharmacological and genetic strategies that experimentally inhibit or delay apoptosis in mammalian systems have elucidated the key contribution of this process not only to (post-)embryonic development and adult tissue homeostasis, but also to the etiology of multiple human disorders. Consistent with this notion, while defects in the molecular machinery for apoptotic cell death impair organismal development and promote oncogenesis, the unwarranted activation of apoptosis promotes cell loss and tissue damage in the context of various neurological, cardiovascular, renal, hepatic, infectious, neoplastic and inflammatory conditions.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Wound healing entails a fine balance between re-epithelialization and inflammation so that the risk of infection is minimized, tissue architecture is restored without scarring, and the epithelium regains its ability to withstand mechanical forces. How the two events are orchestrated in vivo remains poorly understood, largely due to the experimental challenges of simultaneously addressing mechanical and molecular aspects of the damage response. Here, exploiting Drosophila's genetic tractability and live imaging potential, we uncover a dual role for Piezo-a mechanosensitive channel involved in calcium influx-during re-epithelialization and inflammation following injury in vivo.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Apoptosis of cells and their subsequent removal through efferocytosis occurs in nearly all tissues during development, homeostasis, and disease. However, it has been difficult to track cell death and subsequent corpse removal in vivo. We developed a genetically encoded fluorescent reporter, CharON (Caspase and pH Activated Reporter, Fluorescence ON), that could track emerging apoptotic cells and their efferocytic clearance by phagocytes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Cancer growth occurs when mutant tumor cells multiply faster than they die, leading to an imbalance in cell population.
  • Apoptosis serves as a natural control on cell numbers by removing damaged or potentially harmful cells, but in high-grade cancers, it can paradoxically coexist with increased levels of apoptosis.
  • The dual role of apoptosis can both suppress tumors by eliminating harmful cells and promote tumor growth by creating an environment that aids tumor survival and therapy resistance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Drosophila provides a powerful model in which to study inflammation in vivo, and previous studies have revealed many of the key signaling events critical for recruitment of immune cells to tissue damage. In the fly, wounding stimulates the rapid production of hydrogen peroxide (HO). This then acts as an activation signal by triggering a signaling pathway within responding macrophages by directly activating the Src family kinase (SFK) Src42A, which in turn phosphorylates the damage receptor Draper.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Macroautophagy (autophagy) targets cytoplasmic cargoes to the lysosome for degradation. Like all vesicle trafficking, autophagy relies on phosphoinositide identity, concentration, and localization to execute multiple steps in this catabolic process. Here, we screen for phosphoinositide phosphatases that influence autophagy in Drosophila and identify CG3530.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Macrophages must not only be responsive to an array of different stimuli, such as infection and cellular damage, but also perform phagocytosis within the diverse and complex tissue environments found in vivo. This requires a high degree of morphological and therefore cytoskeletal plasticity. Here, we use the exceptional genetics and in vivo imaging of Drosophila embryos to study macrophage phagocytic versatility during apoptotic corpse clearance.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Several cell lineages migrate through the developing and adult tissues of our bodies utilising a variety of modes of motility to suit the different substrates and environments they encounter en route to their destinations. Here we describe a novel adhesion-independent mode of single cell locomotion utilised by Drosophila fat body cells - the equivalent of vertebrate adipocytes. Like their human counterpart, these large cells were previously presumed to be immotile.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Cell migration is hypothesized to involve a cycle of behaviours beginning with leading edge extension. However, recent evidence suggests that the leading edge may be dispensable for migration, raising the question of what actually controls cell directionality. Here, we exploit the embryonic migration of Drosophila macrophages to bridge the different temporal scales of the behaviours controlling motility.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In healthy individuals, injured tissues rapidly repair themselves following damage. Within a healing skin wound, recruited inflammatory cells release a multitude of bacteriocidal factors, including reactive oxygen species (ROS), to eliminate invading pathogens. Paradoxically, while these highly reactive ROS confer resistance to infection, they are also toxic to host tissues and may ultimately delay repair.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Multicellular organisms are not created through cell proliferation alone. It is through cell death that an indefinite cellular mass is pared back to reveal its true form. Cells are also lost throughout life as part of homeostasis and through injury.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The actin cytoskeleton is the engine that powers the inflammatory chemotaxis of immune cells to sites of tissue damage or infection. Here, we combine genetics with live imaging to investigate how cytoskeletal rearrangements drive macrophage recruitment to wounds in We find that the actin-regulatory protein Ena is a master regulator of lamellipodial dynamics in migrating macrophages, where it remodels the cytoskeleton to form linear filaments that can then be bundled together by the cross-linker Fascin (also known as Singed in flies). In contrast, the formin Dia generates rare, probing filopods for specialised functions that are not required for migration.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs) are molecules exposed or released by dead cells that trigger or modulate immunity and tissue repair. In vertebrates, the cytoskeletal component F-actin is a DAMP specifically recognised by DNGR-1, an innate immune receptor. Previously we suggested that actin is also a DAMP in by inducing STAT-dependent genes (Srinivasan et al.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

During the rapid inflammatory response to tissue damage, cells of the innate immune system are quickly recruited to the injury site. Once at the wound, innate immune cells perform a number of essential functions, such as fighting infection, clearing necrotic debris, and stimulating matrix deposition. In order to fully understand the diverse signaling events that regulate this immune response, it is crucial to observe the complex behaviors of (and interactions that occur between) multiple cell lineages in vivo, and in real-time, with the high spatio-temporal resolution.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Adipocytes have many functions in various tissues beyond energy storage, including regulating metabolism, growth, and immunity. However, little is known about their role in wound healing. Here we use live imaging of fat body cells, the equivalent of vertebrate adipocytes in Drosophila, to investigate their potential behaviors and functions following skin wounding.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Over the past decade, the Nomenclature Committee on Cell Death (NCCD) has formulated guidelines for the definition and interpretation of cell death from morphological, biochemical, and functional perspectives. Since the field continues to expand and novel mechanisms that orchestrate multiple cell death pathways are unveiled, we propose an updated classification of cell death subroutines focusing on mechanistic and essential (as opposed to correlative and dispensable) aspects of the process. As we provide molecularly oriented definitions of terms including intrinsic apoptosis, extrinsic apoptosis, mitochondrial permeability transition (MPT)-driven necrosis, necroptosis, ferroptosis, pyroptosis, parthanatos, entotic cell death, NETotic cell death, lysosome-dependent cell death, autophagy-dependent cell death, immunogenic cell death, cellular senescence, and mitotic catastrophe, we discuss the utility of neologisms that refer to highly specialized instances of these processes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The most prominent developmental function attributed to the extracellular matrix (ECM) is cell migration. While cells in culture can produce ECM to migrate, the role of ECM in regulating developmental cell migration is classically viewed as an exogenous matrix presented to the moving cells. In contrast to this view, we show here that Drosophila embryonic hemocytes deposit their own laminins in streak-like structures to migrate efficiently throughout the embryo.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Autophagy degrades cytoplasmic components and is important for development and human health. Although autophagy is known to be influenced by systemic intercellular signals, the proteins that control autophagy are largely thought to function within individual cells. Here, we report that Drosophila macroglobulin complement-related (Mcr), a complement ortholog, plays an essential role during developmental cell death and inflammation by influencing autophagy in neighboring cells.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

HO is an early danger cue required for innate immune cell recruitment to wounds. To date, little is known about whether HO is required for the migration of human adaptive immune cells to sites of inflammation. However, oxidative stress is known to impair T cell activity, induce actin stiffness, and inhibit cell polarization.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF