Neuroimmunology Subgroup

What happens to glia cells in Alzheimer's disease and traumatic brain injury?

• Characterize cellular morphology, function, and metabolism in vitro and in vivo using cell culture and genetic knockout models
• Discover mechanisms and molecular targets in microglial dysfunction in the context of neurodegeneration and neuroinflammation
• Unbiased metabolic profiling of cells and tissues using state-of-the-art LC-MS to understand the role of lipids in neurodegeneration, injury, and development
• Testing immunomodulatory compounds and monitor response on the molecular, cellular, and behavior level.

Immunomodulation Subgroup

How can we modulate cellular function and microenvironment in health and disease?

• Design and develop drug candidates, chemical conjugates and probes.
• Develop molecules to target specific cells, modify cells for enhancing, suppressing, modulating, imaging cellular microenvironments.
• Modulate cell-cell interactions to enhance or suppress specific function, such as phagocytosis.

How can we teach computers to represent, identify and learn molecular structure, properties, interactions and cellular function?

• Focus on several molecular representations for chemical and biological systems using physical modeling and machine learning applications.
• Learning reactivity in different chemical and biological environments
• Learning response of biological cells, structural identification from spectral data with application in lipidomics, metabolomics, proteomics, chemo-proteomics.
• Molecular simulation platform for drug design. Repurposing molecules and data mining for molecular interactions.
  

How can we develop new network-based learning systems inspired by self-organization and emergence in complex systems and learning from architecture and function of cells in the brain to “generate” new chemistry and biology?

• Developing new generative algorithms that can design property-specific molecules.
• Prediction of new chemical and biological reactions, sample and optimization of chemical and experimental parameter space, and making autonomous decisions based on chemical and biological experimental outcomes?
• Making network-based algorithms to predict changes in specific chemical and biological systems properties.
• Developing new deep or network-based learning architectures that allows for changes based on new learning or information inspired by self-organization.
• Develop chemical machine learning methods to develop autonomous analytical instrumentation to optimize experimental objectives?.

Vision

Our group's vision is to establish a Center for Chemical and Cellular Immunology with both basic science and translational focus to affect human health in Cancer, Neuroimmunology, and beyond, eventually affecting all areas of Medicine. Such a Center does not exist in the United States, and we would like to develop this world-class program as the next frontier in Medicine by bringing together ideas and expertise from Immunology, Cancer Biology, Neuroscience, Chemistry, Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Engineering and Medicine. The initial focus of our group have been to translate novel immunological therapies for cancer and neurodegeneration by developing tools and targeted therapeutics. Neuroimmunology is where cancer immunology was ~15 years ago and this is a huge untapped opportunity for the future of medicine. The basic science in chemistry, immunology and engineering in partnership with disease experts and clinical scientists will be essential to translate these discoveries to new medical frontiers beyond small molecules, biologics and targeted cell therapy.