Immune System

Valhalla Fellow Lindsey Backman explains what the microbiome is and the roles that different members of our microbiomes play in health and disease. She also discusses how her lab studies adaptations that some microbes have evolved to tolerate oxygen-containing environments, and how researchers may be able to use what she learns to create better antibiotics and probiotics.

In Parkinson’s disease, clumps of sticky proteins trigger inflammation in the brain, leading to neuronal death. Whitehead Institute’s Founding Member Rudolf Jaenisch and colleagues have now found that a mutation causing these proteins to misfold and become sticky can also turn the brain’s immune cells from friends to foes, possibly accelerating the progression of the disease.

Whitehead Institute Member David Page and colleagues measured the effects of the sex chromosomes on two types of immune cells, gaining insights into the cell-type-specific effects of gene regulation by sex chromosome genes. Their work also explores the biological underpinnings of sex biases in immunity and autoimmune disease.

Whitehead Institute Member Jonathan Weissman and colleagues used large-scale systematic genetic screens to identify the molecules and pathways that populate the mitochondrial surface with important and diverse signaling proteins. They deciphered the logic by which the cell ensures the proper delivery of these proteins. These findings may have important implications for understanding the impact on health and disease when these processes go awry.

Whitehead Institute Member Jonathan Weissman and collaborators developed a tool to reconstruct the family trees and individual states of cells in humans, revealing how blood cell production changes in old age.

Researchers in the lab of Whitehead Institute Founding Member Robert Weinberg have determined how mesenchymal cancer cells may resist treatment, work that may allow them to make once-resistant tumors respond to certain cancer therapies.

Tobiloba Oni—a cell biologist whose graduate research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory helped open new paths for understanding, detecting, and potential treating pancreatic cancer—has been appointed as a Whitehead Fellow.

Using red blood cells modified to carry disease-specific antigens, a team of scientists from Whitehead Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital have prevented and alleviated two autoimmune diseases—multiple sclerosis (MS) and type 1 diabetes—in early stage mouse models.  This research is an exciting step toward therapeutics for autoimmune diseases, which affect an estimated 23 million Americans.