Research

The main theme of our research is to understand host-pathogen interactions in the broad spectrum of health and disease for the goal of developing host-directed therapy for infectious diseases. We are particularly interested in how the host immune system suppresses or tolerates acute and chronic infections using functional genomics approaches.

Our current focus is sepsis, an ultimate outcome of any uncontrolled infection. Sepsis is defined as life-threatening organ dysfunction caused by a dysregulated host response to infection. Despite considerable advances over the last decades, sepsis is still a leading cause of death in intensive care units, and patients develop prolonged immune paralysis leading to a high incidence of recurrent infections.

The team is devoted to deep understanding of immune dysfunction mechanism in sepsis for novel therapeutic hypotheses, through close collaboration with Harvard teaching hospitals. The goal of our current research is to elucidate the mechanisms of immune paralysis and consequent organ dysfunction in sepsis using clinical samples and animal models.