When I was younger, I just did not heal the same way. I would see these scabs, and, like, I'd pick at them, they'd take forever to close, and my brother's skin would just close right up. And then, you know, my sisters could have cramps, and they would just take ibuprofen, and it would be like nothing. And I would take ibuprofen, I would take a lot of ibuprofen, and I would get no response for my whole body. And so I just was like, "Why? Please help me." At first, I felt like I got the short end of the biological stick, right? Why does my body not work the same way? There was a lot of frustration, because no one knows how they respond to something until they try it. But it was just I was different from them, that's all.
I’m Dr. Erika Moore and I’m an equity bioengineer. So every single time you get a paper cut or even a bruise, your immune system is there. Macrophage immune cells are present. They're like the watchdog of the body. I think of them as, like, squishy balls, and they just kind of are always surveilling around the body. Sometimes, they're eating, but other times, they're just saying, "Hey, man, don't be mad. This is cool. We can heal now, right?" Just imagine, like, a squishy ball that's sometimes angry, sometimes happy.
(Laughs)
They’re super cute, I love them.
(Laughs)
I really study what function or state they adopt based on what environment they’re in and based on whose body they come from. There are a lot of other material scientists, bioengineers who've asked and developed really cool applications, but oftentimes, we don't really consider who is studied. My work really focuses on the who of the disease, so I really want to study the diseases that particularly are health disparities, that only certain swaths of the population are affected by, because I think that by shining a light on those diseases, we can ensure better health equity for everyone in the world.
I think I'm the first person or lab to really spearhead or cheerlead some of these endeavors, because there are lived experiences that a lot of other people in academia and in traditional PhD training don't really have to consider, right? So there aren't that many women of color who are assistant professors, who run research programs and do these other things.
I knew so many women, growing up, who died from lupus. It was very common. When I went to try to study lupus, there were a lot of people who were like, "We're agnostic. Like, we don't care about the background of the patients." But I was like, "We know that, like, 90 percent of lupus patients are women, and of that, about 70 percent are women of color.” So we really have to consider that, right? It should be a variable.
Some women develop lupus, they don't ever have flares. They're fine. Other women develop lupus and have flares back to back, and pretty much develop major cardiovascular disease very early on. And so we want to take their patient cells and look at their interactions with blood vessels and see how they confer or propagate different inflammation in the system. And we do that all in this little jello construct. So it’s almost like a mini-tissue outside of the body. And we put the cells in it, and then we can study how they would respond in a tissue-like environment.
What we found was really cool. The patient's background really directly affected the blood vessels in the system. We saw an increased number of blood vessel interactions between macrophages that were isolated from African-American women compared to those macrophages that were isolated from European women. These tissue models help us answer some really important questions. What if we could pinpoint why inflammation happens in certain bodies more violently than others? What if we could cure autoimmune illnesses by accounting for disease differences based on your background? What if we could prevent excessive fibrosis by tailoring your macrophages to respond differently to injury?
I think my lived experiences made me more likely to ask these questions. And then I was just willing to try, you know, and I'm still willing to try. I think by continuing to try, we innovate on what's the norm and set new standards for the future. If we pay a little bit more attention to the details, I think we can easily build a more equitable health care system for everyone. That's my goal.
