Autophagy and Molecular Nutrition with Jeffrey Novack, PhD

Autophagy is  a term that refers to cellular self-digestion.  We have heard the term self-attack-self in situations like autoimmunity; Well this a different type of process that is a normal every day process in the cell of cellular self-digestion. Technically autophagy is a catabolic metabolic program/process that is activated when intracellular nutrient uptake or availability is diminished.  It was coined in the 1960’s by the late Christian de Nuve. It has resurfaced quite predominately since  Yoshinori Ohsumi was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy – a study into how cells detoxify and repair themselves.  Autophagy has a number of pathways that are studied that are associated with it such as the Mammalian Target of Rapamycin (MTOR) and  Nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2 (NRF2). This is relavant because we know inflammation causes disease and many protective pathways of inflammation are regulated by NRF2 . Likewise we know that protein aggregating in cells is one of the key findings in disease.  Autophagy is one of the pathways that clears up protein debris from harming cells.   So understanding inflammation and autophagy is kind of important.  Inflammation can knock down autophagy so these topics must be studied together. Our guest Dr. Jeffrey Novack understand these pathways quite well and most interesting to us is that he understands how nutrition and chemicals from plants can influence these pathways.   More about our guest. 

Dr. Jeff Novack earned his Ph.D. in pharmacology from the University of Washington School of Medicine (Department of Pharmacology) in signal transduction (lab of Dr. Joe Beavo). He did post-doctoral research in immunology and tyrosine kinase signaling at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center (lab of Dr. John Cooper). He taught pharmacology, immunology, infectious disease, and pathology at the medical school level for 13 years. He most recently was a tenured faculty at Bellevue College, where he taught anatomy and physiology, microbiology, cell biology, and nutrition. Dr. Novack joined the faculty at PNWU in September of 2012 and has taught immunology, portions of pathology, and pharmacology. He has done research on the effects of PSK on immune function in mice and humans and is interested in the effect of natural products on the innate and adaptive immunity and on inflammation. He likes to hike (has climbed all of the volcanoes in Washington state), bike, fish, cook and do polar bear swims in the winter.

Articles mentioned in the episode

Novack. Jeffrey. 2017, Autophagy and Proteostasis: A Unifying Theory of Neurodegenerative  Disease. Journal of Restorative Medicine.Vol 6 No 1. Pg 3-18

Autophagy Resources

DR.Yoshinuri Oshimi, Autophagy Nobel Peace Prize 2016

SIIM Land, Metabolic Autophagy 

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