Wen Xie, PhD, associate professor of pharmaceutical sciences, received a five-year, $1,636,202 grant from the National Institutes of Health for “A Novel Role of the Aryl Hydrocarbon Receptor in Hepatic Steatosis.”
The aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) is a transcriptional factor originally cloned as a xenobiotic receptor to sense xenobiotic toxicants. The goal of this study is to determine whether AhR has an endobiotic role in promoting hepatic steatosis. Hepatic steatosis, or fatty liver, is a common medical problem strongly associated with metabolic syndrome. It is hoped that results from this study may help to establish AhR as a novel therapeutic target for fatty liver in human patients.
