Benaroya Research Institute (BRI) postdoctoral researcher, LeAnn Nguyen, PhD, was recently awarded the competitive Institute for Translational Immunology fellowship through the University of Washington that aims to prepare postdoctoral candidates for a variety of careers and accelerate basic immunology research to clinic-ready therapies. Dr. Nguyen was selected for her outstanding work in the Ray Lab at BRI addressing the genetic causes of autoimmune disease with direct implications for improving treatment efforts.
Dr. Nguyen’s project will characterize the effects of genetic variants that are linked to autoimmune diseases in order to develop more effective therapeutics. Her research uses massively parallel reporter assays (MPRAs) and CRISPR interference screens to characterize the effects of disease-relevant genetic variants on T and B cells, which play key immunologic roles in the response to autoimmune disease.
Current therapeutics for autoimmune disease are not effective for all patients. Identifying the genetic causes will allow for the development of therapies that better target the specific pathways that lead to disease. Previous work from the laboratory of John Ray, PhD, identified an uncharacterized druggable pathway in T cells linked to T cell biology and autoimmunity. Dr. Nguyen’s work aims to elucidate additional pathways that drive autoimmune traits by extending this gene variant-to-function pipeline to other immune cell types and across multiple autoimmune diseases.
“We are looking at around 114,000 genetic variants across 288 immune diseases and traits,” said Dr. Nguyen. “We are excited to characterize the effects of these variants on immune cell function and work with our collaborator, Dr. Ryan Tewhey at the Jackson Laboratory, to train machine learning models to predict variant effects on gene expression. Our results will provide a large search space to model gene regulatory networks that drive autoimmune disease risk, allowing us to discover potential drug targets.”
For more information about BRI, visit www.benaroyaresearch.org.
