Cholsoon Jang, Ph.D.

Research

My lab will explore how organs communicate with each other to maintain metabolic health as a uniform entity—and what happens when these regulatory processes go awry. Many diseases target a specific organ: Cardiovascular disease (CVD), for example, mostly damages the heart. But other organs should not be overlooked; for example, the liver, intestine, and fat tissues regulate circulating cholesterol and vascular inflammation, key contributors to CVD. In my laboratory, I pioneered a novel method for comprehensively cataloging the metabolic communications that occur between different organs in pigs fed a control healthy diet or a high-fat, high-sugar Western diet. Now, using powerful analytical chemistry and computational tools, I will assess how the profile of thousands of circulating metabolites that enter and exit various organs evolves as CVD progresses. Moreover, I will identify the proteins that are responsible for producing, consuming, and transporting CVD-relevant metabolites. My work will eventually uncover novel targets for therapeutic interventions that mitigate the progression of CVD.