Georg Häcker: "Apoptosis: from pathway analysis to clinical relevance"

Professor Georg Häcker
Institute of Medical Microbiology and Hygiene, University Freiburg

Apoptosis: from pathway analysis to clinical relevance

Among the most exciting developments in biomedical research is the progress in understanding the molecular events that govern the physiological and pathophysiological responses to stimuli in humans. I will here attempt to use the apoptotic signal transduction pathway and a response to infection to illustrate such a contingency. With a number of experimental examples, I will demonstrate how the apoptotic pathway is linked to other signalling events inside a human cell, how the action of mitochondrial proteins of the Bcl-2 family orchestrates apoptosis, and how this action can operate in neutrophil granulocytes to determine the severity of inflammatory disease.