After "Interesting" Journey, Dr. Kyle Poulsen is doing the research he loves in the place he loves doing it

By Chuck Carlson

Back in the day Dr. Kyle Poulsen was like so many other 18-year-olds, caught between knowing he needed to do something with his life but not having much of an idea what that might be.

Growing up in New Jersey, he admitted he never took his high school work all that seriously and continued that attitude in college where he flunked out of Carnegie Mellon University – twice.

He smiles at the memory.

“I had an interesting path to academics,” he says now. “I really didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up.”

But when his family moved to Michigan, he eventually enrolled at Grand Rapids Community College and something started to change. “I really didn’t know academics or science,” he said. “I thought maybe I’d be interested in engineering or something. I had no idea. And, lo and behold, I figured out how to go to school again.”

He hasn’t stopped since.

Today, some 25 years after wondering who, what, and where he was going, Dr. Poulsen finds himself exactly where he wants and needs to be. His new position as Assistant Professor in the MSU Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology (PhmTox)will allow him to continue the work he loves to do -- researching how alcohol impacts the liver and how to help those in need without appropriate medical interventions.

That connection to MSU began when he met PhmTox researchers Dr. Robert Roth and Dr. Patricia Ganey during an interview weekend at MSU while he was an undergraduate at Eastern Michigan University.

“That’s the first time I’d ever been to East Lansing,” he said.

From there, he earned his Ph.D. at Michigan State and eventually was doing significant liver research at the Cleveland Clinic under the mentorship of Dr. Laura Nagy, a leader in alcohol-related research.

Later, he was recruited to the University of Texas at Houston by renowned liver researcher Dr. Cynthia Ju to start his independent career. But his eyes were always looking north and hoping for the chance to return to MSU.

“I knew that PhmTox had this unique position at Michigan State,” he said. “I was watching from afar, and I saw (now retired MSU Professor Emeritus) Rick Neubig bring in an entirely new era with drug discovery. I saw some of the researchers I knew of, like Jim Luyendyk, succeed. It’s all about more students and training students.”

So, when that opportunity to return to MSU did present itself, and provide the chance to reconnect with former classmates, a familiar setting, and a culture with which he knew well, he jumped on it.

He will study the liver, a subject that is familiar to a number of researchers in the department. But his emphasis will be a little different. “I’m focused on how alcohol drives liver injury and ultimately things like fibrosis and cirrhosis,” Dr. Poulsen said.

He knows only too well the historical narrative surrounding alcohol consumption and what it can do to the liver, but he also knows it’s never been quite that black and white.

“Cirrhosis is the end-stage of liver disease,” he said. “That’s when the liver is no longer doing the things it should do. It’s not cleaning the blood, it’s not metabolizing anything. It’s essentially become scar tissue. One of the principle challenges is how to get somebody to the point where they’re stable so they can stop drinking and repair their liver. They can stop and be observed. At present, many patients with severe liver injury due to alcohol never recover even when abstaining.”

Late-stage liver disease, he said, can only be rectified with a very expensive, very invasive transplant, but that’s not always a realistic option.

“My research is trying to get them to the point where, hopefully, a transplant isn’t required,” he said. “We’re trying to make new therapies, and that’s the other arm of pharmacology and toxicology. We want to make new drugs, and we want to scale it up to the point where it’s feasible cell targeting therapy. We’re also interested in why things are going bad in the liver but we’re at the point now where we can jump in and intervene. Is there a specific cell that turns bad at some point and becomes the driver of disease?”

He believes a ubiquitous protein called MIF could hold at least part of the answer. “It’s fascinating because MIF seems to do everything,” Dr. Poulsen said. “It’s everywhere in the body and within the liver, its presence in certain cells can drive disease progression.”

He hopes to find ways to stop MIF from being made, and he hopes to achieve this using an antisense oligonucleotide (ASO). “It’s essentially an interference molecule that stops the gene product from being made,” he said. “In the Petri dish we can totally do it, but how do we do it in the body?”

That has been his goal for years, and he hopes he can find the answer at the place that helped him find the answers to other questions in his life.

“We still have a long way to go,” he said. “But when you work around a bunch of smart people, it tends to make you smarter.”