Beautifully written - thank you! Love the parallelism to development.

8/ Very proud of this work, represented here by the amazing Chloe Prendergast, and excited to see where this field goes next!

7/ Overall, our work highlights the importance of brain fibroblasts after injury, raising the possibility of new therapeutic opportunities for stroke and TBI involving finetuning fibroblast states/transitions to achieve optimal wound healing and immune responses.

6/ Moreover, subsets of late-timepoint fibroblasts create lesional immune niches that direct T cell positioning and suppress cytokine expression - i.e., without fibroblast-derived signals, inflammation is unleashed (with interesting implications for neuronal signaling).

5/ We found that early myofibroblasts prevent cardiovascular collapse and subsequent organ damage after severe stroke, helping explain their protective effect.

4/ Since our preprint, we’ve added some exciting new data regarding the functional roles of fibroblasts after brain injury at early and late timepoints (in addition to an expanded analysis of fibroblast ontogeny and state differentiation, new injury models, and more).

3/ An early myofibroblast state is critical for wound-healing, with fibroblast-deficient mice showing larger lesions and persistent neuroinflammation (and elevated mortality with severe stroke). Myofibroblasts subsequently transition into several late states with distinct roles.

2/ We originally found that fibroblasts, long thought to be largely excluded from the brain, are critical players after injuries including stroke and TBI. Pre-existing fibroblasts expand in a TGFβ- and myeloid cell-dependent manner, passing through several transcriptional states.

1/ Thrilled to share that my PhD thesis work is now out in its final form @nature.com! A huge thanks to the entire team (which has only grown since we first put this out), our peer reviewers, the Nature editorial team, and the incredible @arimolofskylab.bsky.social.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...