Jonathan Sexton

Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine, University of Michigan

The Sexton lab focuses primarily on phenotypic-based drug discovery and development for the interrelated set of disorders involving diabetes, obesity, metabolic syndrome, and associated complications. They use functional outcomes of tissues and cells to guide drug discovery around metabolic endpoints. The current strategy for drug development uses a combination of phenotypic and molecular target-driven approaches with core competencies in pancreatic islet technologies, fatty liver disease, and metabolic regulation in muscle tissue coupled with in vivo models of diabetes and obesity. The main technology focus is high content screening - an automated epifluorescence microscopy approach to biological imaging coupled with image analysis to yield quantitative and clinically relevant endpoints in cellular models of disease.