Welcome to the latest edition of Biomed Bites, a weekly feature that introduces readers to some of Stanford’s most innovative researchers.
Tobias Meyer, PhD, was hooked on biology when he learned humans are made out of cells — 10 trillion distinct little entities, joining together to make a human. ("The way to remember this number is that it is approximately the same as the number of dollars in the American debt," Meyer suggests in the video above.) He goes on to say:
What fascinated me is that each of these individual cells is really something like a small computer that senses the environment — for example hormones it senses but also pathogens like bacteria or even stress.
Then it processes that information, which makes it do things like secrete, divide, or move. So my lab is particularly interested in this question of how cells integrate all these important signals.
Now chair of the Department of Chemical and Systems Biology at Stanford, Meyer and his team try to decipher how the cells that make up the human body work together:
For example, we recently found a receptor that senses calcium in cells that has not been found before. We were able to show this is important in many different systems like immunology and now many drugs companies are using it to develop drugs they didn't have before.
For Meyer, the takeaway from his experience in biomedical research is clear: "By doing fundamental research, we often stumble accidentally on a big thing that can have a big impact later in human health."
Learn more about Stanford Medicine’s Biomedical Innovation Initiative and about other faculty leaders who are driving biomedical innovation here.
