SWAN aims to define molecular mechanisms that move tissues from healthy homeostasis toward disease. For this, SWAN explores molecular metabolism, meaning all the biochemical reactions that occur in all cells, coordinating rapid responses to extrinsic and intrisic stresses and keeping healthy homeostasis. This balance is shifted by diseases.
This theme resolves the metabolic events that accompany the earliest stages of degenerative disease, before clinical symptoms appear. Using a variety of model systems, stem cell derived models and patient samples we produce precision data as well as big data and apply machine learning. SWAN researchers trace metabolic regulation across scales: within organelles, between neighboring cells, across tissues, and through whole organ systems over the lifespan.
Mechanistic and genetic discoveries become useful only when they can be acted on. This theme selects the intervention targets with the strongest preclinical support and evaluates them first in model systems and, where the evidence warrants, in early-stage clinical pilots. In parallel, researchers develop molecular biomarkers that report on incipient disease and on sustained health, providing an objective basis for intervening before conditions become established.