Spiro Getsios, PhD
Assistant Professor of Dermatology;
Cell and Molecular Biology (Adjunct);
Keratinocyte Core Co-Director of the
Skin Disease Research Center (SDRC)
E-mail: s-getsios@northwestern.edu
Biography
Dr. Spiro Getsios is an Assistant Professor of Dermatology; Cell and Molecular Biology (Adjunct), and the Keratinocyte Core Co-Director of the Skin Disease Research Center. A native of Montreal, Canada, Dr. Getsios completed his undergraduate training at McGill University and received his Ph.D. degree from the University of British Columbia. Spiro came to Northwestern University as a Canadian Institutes of Health Research postdoctoral fellow, where he trained in the laboratory of Dr. Kathleen J. Green. He subsequently joined the Dermatology department as a Research Assistant Professor in 2005.
Spiro is currently a scholar of the Dermatology Foundation and directs the keratinocyte laboratory for the department. An active member of the Society for Investigative Dermatology and the American Society for Cell Biology, Dr. Getsios has authored more than 20 peer-reviewed publications.
Research Interests
Dr. Getsios’ research program is aimed at understanding how cell-cell adhesion and recognition processes are orchestrated during normal epidermal development and in pathological conditions such as wound healing and cancer. He has a longstanding interest in a family of cell adhesion molecules, known as the cadherins. As a graduate student, Spiro found that type II classical cadherins established cellular communication between the mother and fetus via the placenta. He extended this analysis of cadherins to the skin as a postdoctoral fellow, where he focused on the role of desmogleins and their binding partner, plakoglobin, in keratinocyte adhesion. This work revealed that desmogleins not only served as structural anchors that maintained tissue integrity but further acted as instructive complexes which allowed for normal epidermal morphogenesis.
More recently, Dr. Getsios has directed his attention to cell-cell signaling pathways that regulate keratinocyte adhesion. He has keyed in on the ability of a large family of receptor tyrosine kinases, termed Eph receptors, to coordinate keratinocyte adhesion and communication upon activation by their ephrin ligands on adjacent cells. Dr. Getsios hopes to harness the ephrin/Eph-Receptor signaling axis in order to refortify epidermal adhesion when these cellular processes become unraveled in pathological conditions.