Funding outcome

Inflammation is a natural process that occurs in our bodies when we encounter things like viruses, bacteria, or even minor injuries. It's like our body's way of sounding the alarm and rallying the troops to fight off potential threats. This inflammatory response is crucial for our health, as it helps us fight off infections and kickstarts the healing process after an injury. But just like too much of anything can be bad, too much inflammation can also cause problems. When inflammation becomes excessive or chronic, it can lead to tissue damage and contribute to serious health conditions like autoimmune diseases, where the immune system mistakenly attacks healthy cells and tissues in the body. Despite its importance, there's still a lot we don't understand about inflammation. For example, how does our body achieve a level of inflammation that is just right, and not so strong that it becomes self-destructive? And how does our body actually turn off the inflammatory response once the threat is gone? That's where our research comes in-we're studying how ketones, which are small molecules produced naturally by our livers, help balance inflammation, with a specific focus on how they affect males and females differently. It seems that ketones can help calm down inflammation, so we are going to test whether inflammation becomes much more extreme in mice who have super low levels of ketones in their blood. By studying how ketones are involved in the inflammatory response, we hope to uncover an important part of human biology that could lead to new insights into how to treat autoimmune diseases more effectively, especially those which largely affect women.