Pam Kreeger

Title: Professor, Biomedical Engineering
Office: University of Wisconsin-Madison

Hierarchy of Cellular Decisions in Collective Behavior: Implications for Wound Healing

Abstract: One of the first steps in dermal wound healing is re-epithelialization, in which keratinocytes collectively move to close the outermost layer of the wound. This process results from multiple individual cell decisions; therefore, to determine which individual cell behaviors represent the most promising targets to engineer re-epithelialization, we examined collective and individual responses of HaCaT keratinocytes in response to different stimuli. Individual cell behaviors were then used to create a partial least squares regression model to predict the hierarchy of factors driving wound closure. Unexpectedly, cell area and persistence were found to have the strongest correlation to the observed differences in wound closure. Meanwhile, the model predicted a relatively weak correlation between wound closure with proliferation, and the unexpectedly minor input from proliferation was validated experimentally. Combined, these results suggest that the poor clinical results for growth factor-based therapies for chronic wounds may result from a disconnect between the individual cellular behaviors targeted in these approaches and the resulting collective response. In ongoing work, we are examining mechanisms that can be used to direct cell persistence in re-epithelialization.

Pam Kreeger, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, received her PhD in Chemical Engineering from Northwestern University and completed a postdoc at MIT. She has received the NSF CAREER Award, the NIH New Innovator Award, and is an American Cancer Society Research Scholar. She has two boys (5 and 1) and is a Cubs fan (this year may actually be the year!).