Lab Life Video Series: Wallace Lab

Wallace Lab Life Video Transcript

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[title]: Lab Life, Wallace Laboratory

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Douglas C. Wallace, PhD:

My name is Doug Wallace. I direct the Center for Mitochondrial and Epigenomic Medicine here at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

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We are a center that involves a series of outstanding individual investigators and their laboratories that all work together on studying the role of complex problems and energy metabolism in relation to various diseases.

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Our particular lab has spent actually a lot of time in the last four years working hard on the role of mitochondrial dysfunction in SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19.

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And what we find is the SARS-CoV-2 virus, specifically attacks the mitochondria, inhibits mitochondrial function, and that in turn shifts metabolism from making energy by mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation to generating substrates for viral replication by glycolysis.

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If we, in fact, inhibit mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation, production of what's called reactive oxygen species, with some drugs then we can significantly inhibit viral replication.

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Yentli Soto Albrecht:

Mitochondria, like the Wallace Lab, have their hands in almost any single disease process that you can imagine.

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Since half of my training is a medical degree, I think about this a lot, about translational potential. So essentially, mitochondria probably intersect with anything you are interested in, even if it’s not metabolically related.

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Regardless of what you do or what you’re interested in, I think you could find your passion here, and with the supportive environment in the Wallace Lab, you can find what you need to succeed.

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Gabrielle Widjaja:

When joining a lab, I wanted to join one where it’s like they’re using breakthrough technology with the best equipment, best personnel, really good leadership, and I really saw that shine through here at the Wallace Lab.

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Timothy Lie:

So, I do a lot of cell culture, sometimes I do Western blots, a lot of imagining on microscopy and a lot of writing for the thesis itself.

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This lab is very conducive in just trying to let everybody learn from their mistakes, I think there is a lot of tolerance into new people that have never done research doing stuff in this lab, so it’s very nice.

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Deborah G. Murdock, PhD:

I came to CHOP because Doug Wallace was at CHOP. He came here and had really great resources to investigate the mitochondria, and all of the great researchers around us who are doing really terrific things.

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And it makes for this great mesh of all these different ideas. And we can also work with Penn here, and put together all the ideas into something that can really be helpful in people’s lives and in their health.

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Prasanth Potluri, PhD:

I am a bioenergetics guy. My PhD was in chloroplasts, which is the other spectrum, the other end of the energy capturing device, whereas mitochondria is how that energy that that’s being produced by plants is being utilized by humans, and how any defects in this apparatus can cause diseases.

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So that was a fascinating thing for me to understand. And Doctor Wallace is the founder of this field. As we are now slowly gaining understanding now, everybody outside this group and outside this institute are slowly realizing the potential of this, this area of research.

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And he's a visionary, and we could believe in his vision. We are sticking together, and we have a long way to go.

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Dr. Wallace:

Our center is somewhat unique here at CHOP in that the center's goal is to foster individual laboratory success. So we're really a consortium of independent investigators and laboratory folks, but all interacting and sharing common ideas and function.

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That has been very effective in allowing each individual lab to garner a number of important grants and contracts, and I think overall has been a very effective way of helping CHOP move forward in new discoveries and providing hope.