Personalized medicine, which seeks to match the right drugs to the right patients at the right time, has been most successful in cases where there is a clear genetic linkage between a disease and a therapy. This is not the case for many diseases, including most immune-mediated diseases, which involve more complex genetics and require new approaches for development of personalized therapies.
Our goal is to develop and use cutting edge systems biology approaches to elucidate molecular signatures of complex immune diseases, including autoimmunity and cancer. We expect these signatures to elucidate fundamental mechanisms of disease and response to therapy; new pharmacodynamic, patient stratification, and treatment response biomarkers; and new therapeutic approaches.
Examples of new therapeutic approaches include combination therapies for type 1 diabetes (T1D) predicted from resistance mechanisms and molecular signatures generated by RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) of treated patient whole blood samples.
Lab Members
Shubham Bansal
Brenda Norris
Erin Witkop, PhD
Research Projects
Elucidating immune processes in tumors that affect patient survival and response to therapy
Exhausted CD8+ T cell populations linked to beneficial response in T1D
Shared germline-like TCR alpha chains in autoreactive CD4+ T cells in T1D
Featured Publications
Proinflammatory islet antigen reactive CD4 T cells are linked with response to alefacept in type 1 diabetes.
JCI Insight
Investigating Thymic Epithelial Cell Diversity Using Systems Biology.
J Immunol
Abatacept for Delay of Type 1 Diabetes Progression in Stage 1 Relatives at Risk: A Randomized, Double-Masked, Controlled Trial.
Diabetes Care
PTPN22 R620W gene editing in T cells enhances low avidity TCR responses.
Elife
Pancreatic islet-specific engineered Tregs exhibit robust antigen-specific and bystander immune suppression in type 1 diabetes models.
Sci Transl Med
Why a New Cancer Treatment Can Lead to Autoimmunity
Immunology to Change Lives: Where We're Going in 2023
BRI was formed with a clear plan: First, answer key fundamental questions about the immune system. Then, build on those answers to change lives. This is a very exciting time because we’re reaching that second stage of the plan.
Clues into Crohn's: Exploring Why the Immune System Attacks Beneficial Bacteria
Your gut is home to a huge community of bacteria called the microbiome. Some bacteria are good, some are bad — and some might hold the key to understanding an inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) like Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.
Publication of the Week: Deep Immune Phenotyping Reveals Similarities between Aging, Down Syndrome, and Autoimmunity
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Type 1 Diabetes Discovery Opens Door to Game-Changing Treatment Strategies
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