Gabrielle Belz

Overall goals:

Our work aims to understand how the immune system responds to infections including viruses, bacteria and parasites.

We are elucidating how different types of immune cells develop, and what factors influences their decision to become one type of immune cell or another.

Understanding how the body deals with pathogens will give clues about how to enhance protective immunity. Our goal is to discover new therapies that boost our immune system to protect against infection.

Research interests:

Cell differentiation is the process by which cells develop and mature. In this process, cells become more specialised and acquire potent effector functions that allow them to eliminate infectious organisms. There is an urgent need to develop new therapies that focus on augmenting host immunity.

Our research focuses on:

• Elucidating the mechanisms responsible for the generation of protective immunity in response to lung and gastrointestinal pathogens
• How protective immunity breaks down in chronic overwhelming infections
• Identifying factors that can promote host immune responses and potent long-lived protective immunological memory.

We have developed and use a number of in vivo models of infectious diseases including:

• Influenza
• Herpes virus
• Lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV)

These models provide us with an unprecedented opportunity to examine the mechanisms that these pathogens employ to infect hosts and elicit immune protection or to subvert the host responses. Using a variety of approaches including multiparameter flow cytometry, systems biology and global gene expression profiling we aim to define cellular and transcriptional pathways in normal memory T cell differentiation, innate immune cell subsets and immune failure.