Trevor Jeffrey Bush

Chronic inflammatory diseases — neurodegeneration, inflammatory bowel disease, and other age-related conditions — are multifactorial in their pathology, driven by many interconnected pathways simultaneously. Western medicine's traditional "one-target, one-drug" model is insufficient here: block a single node in such a network and the body adapts, compensatory pathways take over, and you are left with a weakened therapeutic response and, often, toxic adverse effects from sustained target suppression.

I am interested in breaking from this reductionist model by investigating how traditional medicinal herbs from across the world can be applied to treat chronic inflammatory diseases through a polychemical, multi-target (polypharmacology), systems pharmacology approach. A complementary interest involves the understudied dysregulation of complex lipid metabolism in these diseases — both as a diagnostic and prognostic layer, and as a window into how medicinal herb interventions reshape disease-associated lipid networks.

Before Yale, I completed my B.S. in Biotechnology and Biochemistry at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where I assessed the anti-infective (tuberculosis) and anti-fibrotic capabilities of Artemisia sp. and artemisinic compounds in vitro, and developed plant-based decellularized scaffolds for modeling disease in 3D. Now at Yale, I am a PhD student in the Pharmacology Department co-mentored by Professors Yung-Chi Cheng and Jason Cai, working to further Professor Cheng's vision of merging Western and Eastern approaches into WE Medicine.