Science, Technology and Engineering

Vaux Laboratory

Department of Biochemistry

Research - Apoptosis

Humans have about 10 15 cells. Every second of every day, over a million of them kill themselves. In fact, committing suicide is the ultimate fate of 99% of our cells. If cells fail to die when they should, they accumulate and can turn into cancers. On the other hand, if cells activate their self-destruct mechanisms when they shouldn't, it can cause damage of important tissues such as the heart and brain.

In order to kill themselves, cells activate an inbuilt self-destruct mechanism, and die by a process with a characteristic appearance known as " apoptosis ".

Obviously, it would be wonderful if we had drugs that could get cancer cells to do the right thing and undergo apoptosis, or drugs that could stop neurons dying in strokes, or heart muscle cells dying in a heart attack.

In order to come up with such drugs, it is necessary to understand the mechanisms of cell death at the molecular level. The main goal of the lab is to do just that. We use genetic and biochemical approaches to isolate, identify and characterise components of the cell death mechanism bit by bit.

We are currently looking at these areas:

Bcl-2 family members
Some promote cell death and some inhibit cell death. They funnel signals from many different sources into the core apoptotic mechanism.

IAPs
Inhibitor of Apoptosis (IAP) proteins prevent cell death by countering the activity of caspases, a family of cell death proteases.

TNF superfamily receptors and ligands
Binding of these receptors by their ligands sends signals to the cell that can lead to apoptosis, or activate transcription factors such as NFkB and AP1.