Lance Prince, M.D., Ph.D.

Assistant Professor

Phone: 322-6220
Fax:
Email: lance.prince@vanderbilt.edu

Affiliations

Pediatrics
Cell & Developmental Biology

Disruption of normal lung development causes disease in many children. Our laboratory studies the molecular mechanisms leading to bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD), a common complication of preterm birth. Exposure to inflammation during early stages of lung development leads to BPD. We focus much of our work on how inflammatory signals can interfere with normal lung morphogenesis. One project studies how Toll-Like Receptor signaling inhibits FGF-10 expression in the lung mesenchyme. FGF-10 is a critical growth factor for lung development, and is reduced in patients with BPD in addition to mice exposed in utero to inflammation. We are using many different approaches to understand how inflammatory cytokines and specific signaling pathways can regulate FGF-10 expression. By using the Cre-Lox system in transgenic mice, we are deleting components of inflammatory signaling pathways in specific cell types in mouse lungs to examine how they regulate FGF-10 expression and lung branching morphogenesis. We are also developing several novel transgenic mouse reporter models to determine the fate of specific cell types during normal and abnormal lung development. By using live-cell and live-tissue microscopy, we can image cellular movement, membrane dynamics, and matrix interactions in real time. These approaches are giving us new insights into the cellular and molecular mechanisms occurring during lung development.

Publications

You can also view publications listed at PubMed.