Laboratory Head: Natasha Harvey, PhD
Lab: +61 8 8222 3569
Fax: +61 8 8222 3139
email: natasha.harvey@imvs.sa.gov.au
Despite the first description of the lymphatic vasculature as “milky veins” centuries ago, the field of lymphatic development has remained vastly understudied in comparison to the field of blood vascular development. This has been, in part, due to the lack of molecular tools available to distinguish and manipulate lymphatic vessels. The lymphatic vascular network is a vital component of the cardiovascular system and serves to uptake and return interstitial fluid and proteins to the bloodstream, transport lipids from the digestive tract and provide a conduit for trafficking cells of the immune system.
Dysfunctional lymphatic vessels are the hallmark of a number of human diseases. These include lymphatic vascular malformations, primary congenital lymphoedema syndromes, and secondary lymphoedema arising in response to lymphatic vascular injury due to infection, radiation therapy or tumour growth. In addition to these diseases, there exist both benign and malignant neoplasms of the lymphatic vessels. Recent work has also demonstrated that lymphatic vessels are exploited as an important route of transport for metastatic tumour cells and that the stimulation of lymphatic vessel growth by tumour cells is an event that may dictate the ability of a tumour to metastasize. Contributions to our knowledge of lymphatic vascular development therefore have great potential to aid our understanding of how lymphatic anomalies arise and to offer potential therapeutic benefits for patients of lymphatic diseases and cancer.
Although progress has recently been made in the rejuvenated field of lymphangiogenesis, a plethora of questions remain to be answered, some of which are the focus of study in my laboratory. We are most interested in identifying genes that are important for the processes of lymphatic endothelial cell fate specification, proliferation, migration, navigation and adhesion, events that are critical for the normal development of the lymphatic vascular network. Understanding how these processes are regulated during embryonic development in the mouse should shed light on how these events are deregulated in disease states and may provide potential therapeutic targets for disease treatment. An additional research focus of this laboratory is to identify molecules important for mediating interactions between lymphatic vessels and cells of the immune system, likely to be integral to the regulation of cellular traffic during infection and inflammation.