Molecular Immunology

Research Leader: Associate Professor Simon Barry

The Molecular Immunology group is interested in how a healthy immune system balances being ready to react by swiftly fighting off pathogens, while maintaining tolerance to harmless challenges such as food and body tissues. The cellular immune repertoire in humans is broad, but we are focused on a T cell subset that is shaped, along with the immune system, from birth. These cells are known as regulatory T cells, and they are accepted as the police of the immune system.

There is increasing evidence that in a wide number of disease states including autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis, these cells fail to regulate the immune system, and allow inappropriate destruction of tissues that are essential for life. In order to understand how this breaks down in disease, one must first understand what the basis of a healthy Treg is.

To do this the group is focused on human cells. It uses a number of state-of-the-art gene discovery tools such as microarrays to identify and then confirm the key genes in Treg function. The group has developed a number of lentiviral tools to confirm the functional importance of these genes and these can be applied in any human cell systems. As Treg play a role in autoimmune disease, cancer and transplantation tolerance, our research findings have a wide clinical application.

Research Priorities:

• Identifying the genes responsible for normal regulatory T cell function using genome-wide approaches
• Identifying the molecular pathways of gene regulation by transcription factors and microRNAs in the immune system and in breast cancer
• Developing and using lentiviral technologies to over express and knockdown target genes in primary human cells
• Developing cell-based therapies from cord blood stem cells