Скачать или смотреть Tajie Harris, PhD, Explores the Immune-Nervous System Connection.

Tajie Harris, PhD

Transcript:

So what I love about my job is that every day I get to come to work and work with the most brilliant people. And we're tackling questions at the interface of how the nervous system interacts with the immune system. And this is important because we think that the immune system shouldn't enter the brain, but it does. And so by tackling these questions, we get to inform new therapies that can treat neurological diseases and disorders.

My name is Tajie Harris, and I'm an associate professor in the department of neuroscience. I'm also the director of the Center for Brain Immunology in Glia. And what my lab wants to do is: understand how the immune system gets into the brain to combat an infection? And what we'll learn from this research is how do we get immune cells into the brain, and could we keep them out if we needed to? So what we’re learning about numerous brain disorders and diseases is that the immune system shows up. We're still trying to understand exactly why it shows up, but in some cases we don’t want it to be there. In the case of multiple sclerosis, or MS, we'd like to keep the cells out. In the case of a brain tumor, we might want to bring more cells in. So what we learn in the lab every day will inform the generation of new therapies that can help to promote the immune system or block the immune system from entering the brain.