Director’s Statement

Center for Mechanical Excitability’s Director Talks About Center’s Mission and Goals

“Living cells are continuously exposed to mechanical forces while at the same time physically influencing and adapting to their surroundings. Recent progress has led to the realization of an existing and all-encompassing “mechanobiome”, where forces are sensed, transduced, and exerted as part of a broad range of processes, both physiological and pathophysiological. This emerging concept remains, by and large, descriptive and phenomenological.

While these mechanically-driven phenomena touch almost every fundamental process in biology, their molecular mechanisms are yet to be established. This represents a unique greenfield opportunity that spans naturally from the most basic biology to the understanding and treatment of diseases where mechanobiology plays a defining role (i.e., metastatic cancer, hearing loss, cardiovascular disease, somatosensory and musculoskeletal ailments).

The mission of the Center for Mechanical Excitability (CME) is to lead the development of this nascent discipline, at the mechanistic and discovery science levels.

The CME has been organized to acquire this fundamental knowledge. A truly world class team has been assembled to carry out, in a highly collaborative and integrative way, the key experiments that will transform our fundamental understanding of the role protein dynamics play in linking structure and function.”

Eduardo Perozo, Center’s Director