Science Cafe to show ugly side of collagen

Carol Feghali-Bostwick, Ph.D., knows the title of her February 24 Science Cafe talk at Halo restaurant may make some people think it’s about a beauty treatment. “We’re going to call it, ‘The ugly side of collagen,’” she said. 

Not the kind that gets injected into the face to make it appear more youthful. She’s talking about excess collagen produced by the body that can disfigure hands, scar the heart and thicken the liver in a process called fibrosis. Simply put, it’s uncontrolled scar formation. “It’s almost like a wound healing response that becomes uncontrolled. Goes crazy, basically.”

Feghali-Bostwick, a professor in the College of Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina, said her 5:30 p.m. Science Cafe talk will be a chance for people who want something a little more stimulating than small talk to mingle, ask questions and learn about a mysterious process that affects a lot of people. “We’re trying to put different pieces of the fibrosis puzzle together,” she said.

Fibrosis is not a household name, she said, but it should be. “Someone at the National Institutes of Health reported a few years ago that fibrosis of an organ is responsible for about 45 percent of deaths in developed countries,” Feghali-Bostwick said. “We all know somebody who’s had a heart attack. Well, a heart attack ultimately is fibrosis at the site of the attack in the heart.”

She believes a much less common condition, scleroderma, may hold the key to unlocking treatments for fibrosis in a variety of conditions. Scleroderma is a chronic, systemic condition that affects about 300,000 Americans, where fibrosis hardens the skin and sometimes affects internal organs. The cause is unknown.

“We have a variety of studies,” Feghali-Bostwick said. “We have one where we look at twins, where one has scleroderma and the other doesn’t, which tells us that scleroderma is not inherited. What’s causing it?” She suspects environmental factors.

This will be MUSC’s third Science Cafe. The first, hosted by Kenneth Tew, Ph.D., focused on antioxidants. The second was led by Joseph Helpern, Ph.D., who discussed magnetic resonance imaging. Science Cafés are held across the country to give scientists a chance to share what they’re working on and give the public a chance to learn about important research and advances. 

Feghali-Bostwick leads a team of scientists in MUSC’s Division of Rheumatology and Immunology and is the SmartState and Kitty Trask Holt Endowed Chair at MUSC. Work in her lab has been supported by grants from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, and the SmartState SC Centers of Economic Excellence.