Notable Alumni
Josh Boyce '81

In a nutshell, what’s the nature of your work?
I am interested in the causes of asthma. My research focuses on how leukotrienes, which are chemicals generated by the body’s immune system during inflammatory and allergic reactions, control the development and function of mast cells, which trigger wheezing attacks. Leukotrienes bind to different receptor proteins on mast cells to either increase or decrease their rate of cell division. Leukotrienes can also control mast cells’ output of chemical mediators that contribute to the duration and severity of asthma attacks.

What have been some defining moments of your career?
My lab discovered that the gene coding for the enzyme that allows mast cells to make leukotrienes could be “turned on” by a protein called interleukin 4. This provided a potential explanation for why people with asthma make more leukotrienes than other people. Also, we made the discovery that two of the receptor proteins for leukotrienes functioned as a pair, with one counteracting the other’s function. This provided insight into the purpose for each receptor and the reason some drugs, which only block one of these receptors, don’t work well for all asthma patients.

What developments in your field will have the greatest impact on the careers of students in the sciences?
I think the most exciting development is the rapid acceleration with which laboratory observations can be translated directly into understanding the causes and devising potential treatments for human disease. This results from remarkable technological breakthroughs in molecular biology, genetics, and biophysics. Skidmore students in the sciences will have opportunities to make progress at a more rapid pace than I could have envisioned.

What advice would you offer Skidmore students in the sciences?
Shoot for the moon! If you love what you do and work hard, the rest will follow.

 

Josh was a bio-chem major at Skidmore College. He is now a pediatric pulmonologist and co-director of inflammatory and allergic disease research at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.  This profile originally appeared in Scope Quarterly Winter 2008.