Wise Lab
Principal Investigator: Carol A Wise
Institution: The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (Dallas, TX)
Primary Subfield: Genetics/Genomics
Recruitment Status: ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Project Summary Adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) is a twisting condition of the spine and is the most common pediatric musculoskeletal disorder, affecting 3% of children worldwide. Children with AIS risk severe disfigurement, back pain, and physiologic dysfunction later in life, and are treated symptomatically rather than preventively because the underlying etiology is unknown. Girls requiring treatment for AIS outnumber boys by more than five-fold. Our overall purpose is to understand the biologic causes of AIS as a means to early diagnosis, prevention and non- invasive biologic treatment. With support from this P01 in the previous award period we substantially increased the number of validatedAIS susceptibility loci by large-scale multi-ethnic GWAS meta-analysis. Together with the other projects in the program we also established that the cartilage extracellular matrix (ECM) is a functional tissue in AIS. We subsequently discovered that nonsynonymous variants in genes encoding ECM components COL11A1 and MMP14 are associated with AIS. Together with genomics Project 3 we uncovered evidence of sex-biased PAX1-COL11A1 expression. In parallel, whole genome sequencing in families…
Active NIH Awards
- 5P01HD084387-10: Human Genetics and Clinical Translation (2026)
- 5P01HD084387-10: Developmental Mechanisms of Human Idiopathic Scoliosis (2026)
- 5P01HD084387-10: Developmental Mechanisms of Human Idiopathic Scoliosis (2026)
- 5P01HD084387-09: Developmental Mechanisms of Human Idiopathic Scoliosis (2025)
- 5P01HD084387-09: Developmental Mechanisms of Human Idiopathic Scoliosis (2025)
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