Research:

Our lab seeks to understand the impact of time as a biological variable in the development of chronic respiratory disease and critical illness.  We are especially interested in the impact of circadian rhythms, which are cyclic daily variations in biological function that are pervasive at all levels of biology, from behavior to gene expression. Our group was the first to document that systemic inflammation reprograms the lung circadian transcriptome, metabolome, and rhythms of immune cell trafficking to temporally orchestrate acute lung inflammation.  We were also the first group to harness proteomics to observe how inflammation changes biological rhythms in autophagy, a major mediator of cellular catabolism and proteostasis.   Recently we demonstrated that COVID-19 vaccines effectiveness varies with time of immunization, demonstrating the clinical significance of circadian biology to lung disease.  A special focus of our work is the role circadian rhythms, seasonality, and aging play in viral triggers of asthma exacerbations.

Further Reading:

Haspel JA, Chettimada S, Shaik RS, Chu JH, Raby BA, Cernadas M, Carey V, Process V, Hunninghake GM, Ifedigbo E, Lederer JA, Englert J, Pelton A, Coronata A, Fredenburgh LE, Choi AM. Circadian rhythm reprogramming during lung inflammation. Nat Commun. 2014 Sep 11;5:4753. doi: 10.1038/ncomms5753. PMID: 25208554; PMCID: PMC4162491.

Ryzhikov M, Ehlers A, Steinberg D, Xie W, Oberlander E, Brown S, Gilmore PE, Townsend RR, Lane WS, Dolinay T, Nakahira K, Choi AMK, Haspel JA. Diurnal Rhythms Spatially and Temporally Organize Autophagy. Cell Rep. 2019 Feb 12;26(7):1880-1892.e6. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2019.01.072. PMID: 30759397; PMCID: PMC6442472.

Hazan G, Duek OA, Alapi H, Mok H, Ganninger A, Ostendorf E, Gierasch C, Chodick G, Greenberg D, Haspel JA. Biological rhythms in COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness in an observational cohort study of 1.5 million patients. J Clin Invest. 2023 Jun 1;133(11):e167339. doi: 10.1172/JCI167339. PMID: 37053011; PMCID: PMC10231992.

Ehlers A, Xie W, Agapov E, Brown S, Steinberg D, Tidwell R, Sajol G, Schutz R, Weaver R, Yu H, Castro M, Bacharier LB, Wang X, Holtzman MJ, Haspel JA. BMAL1 links the circadian clock to viral airway pathology and asthma phenotypes. Mucosal Immunol. 2018 Jan;11(1):97-111. doi: 10.1038/mi.2017.24. Epub 2017 Apr 12. PMID: 28401936; PMCID: PMC5638664.

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