Joseph Yunis

Overall goals:

To understand how T cells shape the immune response to respiratory viruses.

My role in The Yu lab is to uncover how T cells differentiate to becoming protective or pathologic, and what factors (age, gender, virus dose, virus strain or therapy, prior exposure etc) drive this process.

Understanding how different hosts deal with respiratory virus infections will give clues about how to enhance protective immunity. Our goal is to discover a pathway or pathways that predispose the host to developing pathologic T cells and devise a novel therapeutic approach that specifically targets this T cell population without affecting anti-viral T cells. This is the ultimate goal.

Similarly, viruses have evolved to evade the host immune response to colonise immune privileged sites. My goal is to understand how we can break this barrier by genetic engineering. If we can engineer T cells to express molecules required to gain entry into the immune privileged sites, we can eliminate chronic infection.

Research interests:

T cell activation is the most important process in the initiating an immune response. How this happens can shape immunity or lead to tissue damage. This is a dynamic process that is not well understood. There is an urgent need therefore, to develop a model to understand T cell activation and the process that drives pathologic T cells. This can then be harnessed in designing targeted therapies that boost antiviral immunity while targeting pathologic T cells. To achieve this, we have developed and use a number of in vivo models of infectious diseases including:

Murine cytomegalovirus Influenza Murid herpesvirus 4 Lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV)

These models provide an opportunity to dissect host, pathogen and environmental relationships in understanding T cell differentiation and function.

We use systems biology and bioinformatics to understand this complex biology. At the technical level, we use a number of approaches including; multiparameter flow cytometry, histology, microscopy, real-time qPCR, virological assays, and ELISA.