Jody Rosenblatt is an American biologist who is a professor of Cell Biology at King's College London. Her research considers epithelial homeostasis. She discovered cell extrusion, a process that removes unwanted cells whilst maintaining epithelial integrity.
Early life and education.
Rosenblatt is from Utah, United States. She was an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. In an interview with the "Journal of Cell Biology", she explained that as a sophomore she did not know that she wanted to become a scientist. She took nine months out of school and moved to Ireland, where she worked on a goat farm. When she returned to America, she got a job working in a laboratory at the University of Utah. After graduating, she spent a year working in industry, before deciding to pursue a PhD. She joined a laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco, where she studied homologues of Cyclin-dependent kinase 1. She has said that at the time new things were being discovered once a week, which made the field very exciting. For her doctoral research, she worked with Timothy Mitchison on actin filament turnover. She moved to the University College London Medical Research Council Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology as a postdoctoral researcher, where she was originally planning to work on wound healing. Whilst closely monitoring wounds that she had created in embryonic epithelia, she identified small, single celled wounds that she had not created. Whilst at UCL, she discovered a process called epithelial cell extrusion. Epithelial cells form a barrier around organs, yet experience some of the highest rates of cell turnover of any cells in the body. Mechanosensing through PIEZO1 triggers the cell extrusion process. When extrusion becomes dysregulated it can cause inflammatory disease or cell invasion.
Research and career.
Rosenblatt started her research group at the University of Utah, where she was appointed the H. A. and Edna Benning Endowed Chair. She looked to understand the mechanisms that guide extrusion and its implications in biological processes. She demonstrated that extrusion was important to cell crowding. She moved to King's College London in 2019, where she holds a joint position with the Francis Crick Institute.
Rosenblatt investigates how epithelial cells maintain a balance through cell death and division. She discovered that these processes are regulated by mechanical forces: overcrowding of cells causes some to become extruded and subsequently die, when they are too sparse, they stretch and divide. Both processes rely on PIEZO1, a stretch-activated calcium channel. Proper extrusion is crucial for controlling epithelial cell numbers. Dysregulation in this process can lead to aggressive metastatic cancers and asthma. She looks to uncover the fundamental processes that underpin cell death, and how to design treatments for otherwise untreatable diseases.