Irina Conboy got her PhD. in Pat Jones laboratory at Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University, in Molecular and Cellular Immunology. She met her soulmate in science, martial arts, gardening and life, Michael Conboy at Harvard and they got married before starting the graduate studies. They celebrated their Silver Anniversary a few years ago and have been working for almost two decades as a team deciphering why when we are young “there is no pain – no gain”, but as we age “there is more pain and much less gain”.
Summarily, paradigms that emerge from the body of our work that garnered over 2,500 citations propose that adult tissue repair recapitulates embryonic organogenesis in the interplay between conserved morphogenic pathways; and that aging of multiple tissues (ultimately leading to pathology) is greatly influenced by the diminished function of their resident stem cells due to the skewing of signal transduction. Robust and rapid enhancement of maintenance and repair of multiple tissues in an old/pathological mammal can be achieved by deliberate calibration of key signaling pathways to their “youthful” intensity.
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