Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Our research program involves a combination of approaches, primarily with human samples and often in conjunction with clinical interventional or observational studies, to interrogate both the innate and adaptive immune responses to major dietary and aeroallergens.

Working together with leading clinical investigators around the world as part of the Consortium for Food Allergy Research and the Inner City Asthma Consortium and the newly established Food Allergy Research Center at MGH, we are adapting the use of polychromatic flow cytometry and peptide microarray-based humoral immune profiling and systems biology approaches to uniquely characterize the phenotype and function of allergen-specific T and B cell responses and the regulations of effector cells in pediatric food allergy and asthma.

Equally important is the effort to understand the mechanisms that influence early immune fate decisions to allergens and the intrinsic properties of those allergens that facilitate an allergic response and we are studying this in human and murine model systems.