Bioscience Initiative

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Multi-scale systems analysis of cell-cell communication and signaling in complex inflammatory disease

Van Leeuwenhoek Lecture on BioScience.

Douglas Lauffenburger is Ford Professor of Bioengineering and Head of the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT, and also holds appointments in the Department of Biology and the Department of Chemical Engineering. He is a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, the Center for Biomedical Engineering, the Center for Environmental Health Sciences, and the Center of Gynepathology Research.

Douglas Lauffenburger`s BS and PhD degrees are in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois and the University of Minnesota, in 1975 and 1979 respectively. His major research interests are in cell engineering, the fusion of engineering with molecular cell biology. Lauffenburger has coauthored a book entitled: Receptors: Models for Binding, Trafficking & Signaling, published by Oxford University Press in 1993, and coedited another entitled Systems Biomedicine, published by Elsevier Press in 2010.

More than 90 doctoral students and postdoctoral associates have completed their training under his supervision or co-supervision.

Douglas Lauffenburger has served as a consultant or scientific advisory board member for Astra-Zeneca, Beyond Genomics, CellPro, Eli Lilly, Entelos, Genstruct, Insert Therapeutics, Johnson & Johnson, Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer, Precision Therapeutics, SyStemix, the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund, and the Whitaker Foundation. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and has served as President of the Biomedical Engineering Society, Chair of the College of fellows of AIMBE and on the Advisory Council for the National Institute for General Medical Sciences at NIH as well as on the National Research Council Board on Chemical Sciences & Technology.

Complex inflammatory diseases such as arthritis, diabetes, and endometriosis involve interactions of immune system cells with tissue cells via molecular communication processes, and resulting disease consequently arises from dysregulated signaling network activities governing pathological cell behaviors. We are employing combined experimental/computational systems biology approaches to understand these communication and signaling processes at multiple scales, integrating across multiple intracellular pathways, multiple extracellular factors, and multiple cell types. Application contexts include human patients/subjects, experimental animal models, and tissue engineered in vitro micro-physiology platforms. This lecture will present some of our recent work along these avenues.