"The future of microbes and mankind will probably unfold as episodes of a suspense thriller that could be entitled Our Wits Versus Their Genes" Joshua Lederberg
Welcome to Unutmaz laboratory web site. Our laboratory is located at Vanderbilt University Medical Center at the department of Microbiology and Immunology. In this site you will find information about our research, lab members, links to our collaborators and other fun events about our lab.
Our research focus is to understand how the human immune system works and how Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) exploits the immune response to establish a chronic infection, eventually destroying the immune system. More specifically we would like to understand how the T lymphocytes comunicate with the sentinels of the immune system, the dendritic cells. We believe the communication between T cells and dendritic cells decides the differentiation fate of the T cells and thus whether the immune response will be beneficial, harmful or useless. We hope that decoding the language between T cells and dendritic cells will help us to modulate immune responses during diseases and in developing new vaccines.
We are also particularly interested how the signals from dendritic cells and the environmental signals decide the activation and differentiation of T cells, which in turn regulate the immune response against variety of pathogens. How the immune response is regulated by specialized regulatory T cells is also a major focus of our research. Furthermore, because T cells and dendritic cells are the targets and hosts of HIV, we are trying to understand what HIV knows about the immune system and identify the host mechanisms that enable its survival and replication within these cells. We believe decoding the molecular interactions between T cells, dendritic cells and HIV could profoundly impact our ability to modulate the immune response and understand immune pathogenesis of HIV infection that inevitably leads to development of AIDS.
In addition, we are also interested in T cell homeostasis, differentiation and aging. We would like to decode the transcriptional and epigenetic mechanisms that program T lymphocytes into effector long-lived memory cells. We believe understanding the molecular mechanisms of T cell differentiation will allow us to reprogram terminally differentiated cells, thus extending their lifespan in HIV-infected and aged individuals and also design better vaccines. We are pursuing variety of approaches including generation of human lymphocytes from stem cells and lentiviral mediated gene expression and RNAi-mediated gene downregulation for these aims. These studies could also have broader biological implications in understanding cellular aging and differentiation processes.
Our recent discovery that peptides derived from frogs can kill HIV is making big news, check out the Vanderbilt University Medical Center reporter site for detailed story on this.
Derya Unutmaz, M.D. (Principal Investigator)