“And we still have nothing in terms of drugs to treat fibrosis,” said Jacques Behmoaras, who is the deputy director of the Centre for Computational Biology and an associate professor with the Cardiovascular and Metabolic Disorders Programme at Duke-NUS.

Fascinated by this carefully balanced process, Assoc Prof Behmoaras and colleagues delved deeper, zooming in on the role of macrophages, immune cells that are known to repair injured tissues and organs, to determine if the macrophages at work in the scarring of different organs share any traits that could hold the key to a new treatment approach.

“From previous studies, including our own, we had noticed a particular molecule that kept popping up in macrophages in fibrosis, a bit of a smoking gun really,” systems geneticist Enrico Petretto, who leads the Centre for Computational Biology and is also an associate professor with the Cardiovascular and Metabolic Disorders Programme at Duke-NUS. “But rather than focus on just this signal, we wanted to approach this question in a totally unbiased manner.” Read more>>

Source: Scanning scars, Duke-NUS scientists find a scarcode common across organs