The Early Life Development of the Immune System

The main focus of the Jain lab is to understand how immunity develops in early life. In utero, the developing fetal immune system must tolerate myriad maternal antigenic exposures including nutrients, microbial products and xenobiotics that are transferred across the placenta. At birth, the still developing immune system of the newborn is abruptly exposed to a multitude of environmental and microbial antigens and must rapidly form a discrimination of friend from foe. The early life immune system itself undergoes rapid and radical changes during this time that are driven by these antigenic events and the action of transcription factor regulatory circuits that direct the development and effector programming of specific immune cell types. Our goal is to understand how host and environmental factors contribute to shaping early life immunity and the consequences of this imprinting on disease susceptibility in later life.