Microbiology, Immunology, and Pathology

Our laboratory is devoted to investigating the pathogenesis and immune response to mycobacterial species, especially M. tuberculosis, with the main interest in the immune responses induced by vaccines. More recently, our knowledge and expertise evaluating the cellular and molecular immune responses to Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG) and additional anti-TB vaccine candidates, is being applied to evaluate novel vaccine candidates and therapeutics against SARS-CoV-2 (causative agent of COVID-19).

In our laboratory, we have the ability to test how effective the immune response is against different clinical strains of bacterial and viral infections. Our goal is to better understand the immune response to different vaccine candidates using multiparametric and transcriptional unbiased analysis of the cells induced after vaccination. We also utilize metabolic profiles, high throughput and histologic methods, and computational tools to evaluate immune responses.

Furthermore, as the director of the CSU Flow Cytometry and Cell Sorting facility and due to our lab experience using flow cytometry as an analytical tool, our laboratory has been implementing and developing new tools for multicolor flow cytometry analysis. We are currently using algorithms that automatically identify cell populations according to their marker expression profiles. These computational methods not only can identify rare populations, but also to match cell populations across samples, and statistically compare features between different populations. The algorithms we recently published in Scientific Reports (Cyto-Feature Engineering: A Pipeline for Flow Cytometry Analysis to Uncover Immune Populations and Associations with Disease) provides an unsupervised analysis, allowing an unbiased investigation of cytometry data.