The Bhagirath Singh Early Career Award in Infection and Immunity 2022 Recipient

Ajitha Thanabalasuriar

With every breath we take, the immune system in our lung is hard at work. Innate immune cells clear foreign particles and infectious invaders to keep our lungs healthy. However, during trauma, particularly after skin burns, the body goes into a state of immune suppression, that results in the lung losing its unique immunological abilities to clear infections. Bacterial infections can easily take over an immune compromised individual unless they are treated with antibiotics. However, due to the overuse of antibiotics, there is an increase in antibiotic resistant bacteria, making this therapy ineffective. Therefore, it is becoming more and more difficult to treat immune suppressed individuals. We use mice to model trauma induced immune suppression, to understand why our lungs suffer. We have found a specific immunological pathway commonly seen in cancer patients also also turn on after skin burn injury. Remarkably temporally regulating this pathway resulted in reestablishment of lung's ability to clear bacterial infections. The long-term goals of this project are to understand these immunological pathways in order to develop alternative therapies. We aim to develop a drug that can be used in patients with antibiotic resistant infections.

Date modified:

2023-07-13