The Wietecha Lab is part of the Department of Oral Biology at the UIC College of Dentistry.

In our lab we are fascinated by the complexity of wound healing, an evolutionarily optimized program for efficient repair of damaged tissue involving dozens of cell types and thousands of molecules interacting across space and time. While wounds in the oral cavity heal much faster than those in the skin,  healing becomes dysregulated in many chronic diseases, including in diabetes (which causes wounds to heal poorly, or not at all) and in cancer (which has been described as an over-healing wound). 

Only in recent years has it become possible to more fully appreciate the symphony of healing and its dysregulation in diseases by emerging multi-omic tools such as single-cell and spatial transcriptomics. Our research combines these multi-omics technologies with state-of-the-art systems biology and bioinformatics approaches. We also use powerful tissue imaging and classic molecular biology methods to study normal, optimized and dysregulated wound healing in animal and cell models. Our lab therefore provides an ideal training environment for undergraduate students, professional students, graduate students and post-docs interested in systems and molecular biology.  

Among many research problems, we wish to begin to figure out why oral tumors are so much more aggressive than their much-more-common counterparts in the skin. Our hypothesis is that the superior healing potential of oral mucosa plays a critical role.