Certain tissues in the body including the eye are relatively resistant to autoimmune injury and are referred to as immune privileged sites.\u00a0 Andrew Taylor studies the factors that contribute to immune privilege and he has identified a number of neuropeptides in the fluid filling the anterior chamber of the eye that have potent immunosuppressive and immunoregulatory effects on T cells and macrophages.\u00a0 Understanding the mechanisms responsible for immune privilege may enable these pathways to be manipulated to regulate diverse inflammatory disorders.<\/p>\n
Gustavo Mostoslavsky is interested in stem cells and their potential clinical applications in two broad areas.\u00a0 He has developed a novel method to generate induced Pluripotent Stem cells (iPS cells) and is using iPS cells as well as embryonic stem cells to study how intestinal lineage cells develop and whether iPS cells may have potential for regenerative medicine with respect to intestinal tissue.\u00a0 He is also investigating whether hematopoietic stem cell manipulation using lentiviral vectors expressing particular genes of interest might be an effective approach for the correction of various immunodeficiency disorders.<\/p>\n
Gregory Viglianti\u2019s focus is on defining the protein and nucleic acid composition of the ribonucleoprotein and chromatin related autoantigens characteristic of the autoimmune disease systemic lupus erythematosus and determining which specific forms of cell death lead to their release.\u00a0 These autoantigens are directly immunostimulatory and are thought to contribute to lupus pathogenesis through their ability to activate specific receptors of the innate immune system, in particular Toll-like receptors (TLR) 7 and TLR9.<\/p>\n
Ian Rifkin has two main areas of interest related to systemic lupus erythematosus.\u00a0 The first is the role of TLRs in mediating disease pathogenesis through engagement of nucleic acid-containing autoantigens in dendritic cells.\u00a0 More recently he has focused on how interferon regulatory factor 5, a TLR signaling molecule, contributes both to dendritic cell activation and disease development more generally.\u00a0 The second area of interest relates to the factors that lead to premature atherosclerosis in patients with lupus and how modulation of inflammatory pathways can reduce the development of atherosclerosis in lupus.<\/p>\n
Faculty involved in this research are:<\/p>\n
Certain tissues in the body including the eye are relatively resistant to autoimmune injury and are referred to as immune privileged sites.\u00a0 Andrew Taylor studies the factors that contribute to immune privilege and he has identified a number of neuropeptides in the fluid filling the anterior chamber of the eye that have potent immunosuppressive and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1171,"featured_media":0,"parent":809,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/immunology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/864"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/immunology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/immunology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/immunology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1171"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/immunology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=864"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/immunology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/864\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2859,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/immunology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/864\/revisions\/2859"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/immunology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/immunology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}