"Tilla S. Worgall, is an academically oriented clinical pathologist with a basic research interest in elucidating the role of sphingolipids in human disease and a clinical interest to adapt aptamers to determination of small molecules relevant to human disease in a point of care format. Her basic research uses cell culture and mouse models to understand the role of sphingolipids in atherosclerosis, cystic fibrosis and childhood asthma. She recently showed that decreased sphingolipid synthesis induces airway hyperreactivity. Studies had been prompted by GWAS studies that strongly implicated SNPs in the ORMDL3 protein, an inhibitor of sphingolipid synthesis, in childhood asthma. Our findings were received with interest as they might have identified a specific and targetable novel metabolic pathway leading to asthma. A different line of interest is to adapt aptamers which are short strands of DNA that can fold and form receptors to detection of small molecules relevant to metabolic disease. DNA aptamers, developed by a collaborator at Columbia University, are cheap, robust, versatile and insensitive to temperature; advantages to development of point of care methodology for home and global health applications.

Pediatrics