NARILIS lunch seminar | Dr. Dustin BAGLEY, King's College London

We are pleased to invite you to a seminar given by

Dr. Dustin Bagley ^PhD

Research Associate at the Rosenblatt Lab - Cell extrusion & epithelial homeostasis

Randall Centre for Cell & Molecular Biophysics, King's College London, UK

His seminar is entitled:

Bronchoconstriction damages airway epithelia by crowding-induced excess cell extrusion

Asthma is deemed an inflammatory disease, yet the defining diagnostic feature is mechanical bronchoconstriction. We previously discovered a conserved process called cell extrusion that drives homeostatic epithelial cell death when cells become too crowded. In this work, we show that the pathological crowding of a bronchoconstrictive attack causes so much epithelial cell extrusion that it damages the airways, resulting in inflammation and mucus secretion in both mice and humans. Although relaxing the airways with the rescue treatment albuterol did not affect these responses, inhibiting live cell extrusion signaling during bronchoconstriction prevented all these features. Our findings show that bronchoconstriction causes epithelial damage and inflammation by excess crowding-induced cell extrusion and suggest that blocking epithelial extrusion, instead of the ensuing downstream inflammation, could prevent the feedforward asthma inflammatory cycle.

Read more: Bagley et al., 2024

Invited by Prof. Alison Forrester, UNamur, URBC