“Translational Osteoimmunology: Unraveling the Skeletal-Immune Connection”

One in two women and one in four men will experience an osteoporotic fracture in their lifetimes. Current bone research, a field tightly intertwined with the function and activation of the immune system, exclusively relies on immune-naïve specific- pathogen free mice comparable to newborn humans, in contrast to ‘dirty’ mice characterized by diverse microbial exposures yielding a mature immune system closely matched to that of adult humans. Little-Letsinger aims to understand how microbiota-induced immune activation impacts bone mass acquisition during adolescence, a critical period of skeletal development and primary determinant of lifelong bone health, with the goal of establishing a novel translational model and identifying novel avenues for osteoporosis prevention and treatment.

Speaker:

Sarah Little-Letsinger is a postdoctoral research at Duke University in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology and an Instructor in the School of Medicine. Little-Letsinger earned her BS in Human Nutrition, Foods, and Exercise from Virginia Tech and her MS and PhD in Exercise Physiology from Texas A&M University. Before coming to Duke, Little-Letsinger completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UNC Chapel Hill in Endocrinology and Metabolism. Little-Letsinger is an osteoimmunologist and exercise physiologist whose research focuses on lifestyle factors underlying the prevention and treatment of osteoporosis.