Katerina Akassoglou

Affiliation: UCSD SOM

Assistant Professor of Pharmacology

akass@ucsd.edu
Phone: (858)822-5865

Biography

Katerina Akassoglou earned her Ph.D. in Neuroimmunology from the University of Athens, Athens, Greece in 1998. Her graduate studies focusing on developing novel animal models for MS were performed at the Hellenic Pasteur Institute and the University of Vienna. She trained as a postdoctoral fellow in neurobiology and proteases at State University of NY at Stony Brook and Rockfeller University at the lab of Sid Strickland. In 2002 she obtained a Research Associate position at the Molecular Neurobiology program at Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine, NYU, and studied the role of neurotrophins in collaboration with Dr. Moses V. Chao. Dr. Akassoglou was recruited to UCSD in 2003 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology.

Research Summary

Our laboratory is interested in molecular and cellular mechanisms that regulate nervous tissue regeneration. Regeneration failure in the adult mammalian CNS is not due to an inability of central neurons to elongate and remyelinate, but rather to the non-permissive nature of the CNS environment. Our studies identified fibrin as a novel inhibitory protein that delays nerve regeneration after sciatic nerve injury and showed that fibrin degradation correlates with nerve regeneration, while decreased proteolytic activity in the nervous tissue exacerbates damage. Fibrin, derived from the blood protein fibrinogen, is deposited in the nervous tissue after injury or disease associated with blood-brain barrier leakage. For example, in Multiple Sclerosis fibrin deposition correlates with demyelination and persists in plaques that do not show signs of repair. Our research, using in vivo models of inflammatory demyelination, focuses on the cellular mechanisms and molecular pathways that fibrin uses to affect remyelination and inflammation in the nervous system in an attempt to develop novel therapeutic strategies for neuroinflammatory diseases.

References

References From PubMed (NCBI)

Training for Careers in Biomedical Research