The Justin Perry Lab

The human body is estimated to remove 1 percent of its body mass, likely more than 200 billion cells, every day. To achieve this, we rely on a highly evolutionarily conserved process: apoptotic cell clearance or efferocytosis. The long-term goal of our lab is to understand how phagocytes handle the immense burden of ingestion and digestion of apoptotic corpses — a process essential for normal development and tissue homeostasis, but also cancer development and progression. We hope to use the information gained through basic studies of efferocytosis to design novel therapeutics.