UTMB Department of Pathology

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Cellular Signal Transduction in Viral Pathogenesis

Our laboratory focuses on immunoregulatory mechanisms in infection and cancer. These interests are relatively broadly defined in several model systems in man and animals. Our long term goals are to develop improved immunotherapeutics and vaccines.

We are currently pursuing several projects in various species. The first project is an extension into humans of previous work done in a ruminant model system via funding through the NIH. We are evaluating a soluble factor derived from dendritic cells which plays a key role in promoting IgA responses by B cells. Several applications are possible to vaccine development and targeting in addition to selective immunodeficiencies.
A second area is to investigate the role of sex steroid hormones and naturally occurring analogues on the innate and adaptive immune response to infection, allergy/asthma, vaccination and cancer. Portions of this project are funded by the Department of Defense and the Sealy Foundation. Our studies have shown differential effects on antigen presenting cells versus CD4+ T cells by estradiol. Specific aspects of signaling are being investigated in ER-deficient mice at the molecular and cellular levels.

A third project is to investigate various vaccination schemes to improve memory and effector responses by CD8+ T cells to subunit vaccination for tuberculosis in addition to better prognostic markers for vaccine efficacy. This project involves multiple collaborations throughout the world in TB endemic areas.

An additional area of interest are in the use of high throughput protective antigen discovery methods such as expression library immunization (ELI) in collaboration with investigators at Arizona State University for use in vaccines to protect against potential threat agents. Genome based approaches are currently in use for a model bacterial pathogen.

Finally, we are collaborating with multiple investigators on campus to develop and characterize animal model systems for evaluation of flavirus and alpha virus infections and vaccination.