Natural Killer Cells

Research Activities – Mathias Lichterfeld

My lab focuses on human immune responses against retroviral infections, specifically against HIV-1 and HTLV-1. In the context of HIV, my lab is specifically interested in understanding why HIV-1 reservoir cells, a...

Rapid advances in gene engineering make the previously unimaginable rapidly accessible. The Smith Lab for Genetic and Cellular Engineering uses synthetic biology to address our missions of: (1) answering pressing questions around the biology of...

Symbiotic microbiota residing on the body surface (gut lumen, skin and other areas) easily outnumbers our own cells and dwarfs our genome by hundred folds with their metagenome.  Large-scale research projects such as Human Microbiome Project have...

Research focus of my lab is to use novel synthetic biology approaches to manipulate conventional and memory-like Natural Killer (NK) cells to enhance their anti-tumor function. Using advanced CRISPR and non-CRISPR based gene editing approaches we are...

Over the last decade, critical discoveries in immunology and cancer biology have revealed how tumors are shaped by the immune system and how they evolve to evade it. We now know that disrupting immune checkpoints such as PD-1/PDL1 can lead to T cell...

Harness the tools and design principles of synthetic biology to develop novel therapies that can overcome key challenges in cancer immunotherapy

Cancer immunotherapy has shown tremendous success, however several major challenges such as the lack of ideal...

Inflammation is a protective response to noxious stimuli that originate from infections and injured tissues. The inflammatory process triggered in response to microbial infections is instigated by pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs), while the...

We study the molecular pathways that regulate T cell function in the tumor microenvironment, with an emphasis on developing novel mechanistic insights that lead to the development of the next generation of cancer immunotherapies. We integrate analysis of...

Immunologists in the Winau Lab are most excited about the discovery of basic mechanisms that explain how the immune system functions. Over the years, we added to the passion for basic science a strong interest in identifying targets for possible...

Assembly and signal transduction of the T cell receptor for antigen. To examine the role of the CD3 genes in thymocyte development and in T cell function we study mice in which the CD3 genes have been eliminated by homologous recombination techniques. In...