Dr. Emilie K. Grasset, assistant professor of immunology in pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine, has been awarded an NIH R21 award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for her study, “Bacterial translocation to mesenteric adipose tissue drives pathogenic stromal-B cell interactions leading to inflammatory IgG.”
Crohn’s disease is an inflammatory bowel disease that has no cure and often leads to disease complications requiring bowel resection surgery. Crohn's disease can also affect children, and antimicrobial antibodies in pediatric patients are predictive of a faster disease progression. Dr. Grasset believes that understanding how antimicrobial antibodies arise will help identify therapeutic targets for treatment of Crohn’s disease.
The origin of two phenomena correlating with Crohn’s disease complications, mesenteric adipose tissue wrapping around inflamed intestine, or “creeping fat”, and circulating antimicrobial antibodies, are poorly understood. Dr. Grasset will investigate how Crohn’s disease-specific bacteria moving from the gut into the surrounding adipose tissue activate stromal cells and adipocytes, ultimately causing antimicrobial B cells to differentiate into inflammatory antibody-producing plasma cells. Her work has the potential to uncover mechanisms underlying Crohn’s disease pathology, identify novel therapeutic targets, and expand the study of mucosal immunology to mucosa-associated adipose tissues.