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Institute for Infectious & Inflammatory Diseases (i3D)

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Congratulations!


Dr. George Yap , Professor, for being elected into the esteemed American Academy of Microbiology. He joins 64 new fellows, who were elected via a highly selective, peer review process, based on scientific achievements in the advancement of microbiology.


Dr. Tessa Bergsbaken, Assistant Professor, for being selected as the recipient of the 2023 New Jesey Health Foundation Excellence in Research Award for her work on tissue-resident lymphocytes.


Dr. Nicholas Bessman, Assistant Professor and Chancellor Scholar,   for being selected to be one of only two Rutgers University nominees for the Searle Scholars Program.

 

 

 

In The News

In a recent publication (November 2023) in Brain Behavior and Immunity, Dr. George S. Yap and his team in the Department of Medicine and the Center for Immunity and Inflammation identified a new cytokine-mitokine-mitokine cascade that contributes weight loss and sickness behaviors triggered by infection. In this cascade, interferon-gamma (IFN-γ), a key pro-inflammatory cytokine produced during infection triggers the release of growth differentiation factor 15 (GDF-15) from stressed tissues such as the kidney into the bloodstream. In turn, GDF-15 induces weight loss by suppressing food intake and ketosis through fibroblast growth factor 21 (FGF21) production in the liver. Targeting this cascade may represent a therapeutic strategy to combat severe weight loss and wasting disease.

Read more.


Researchers from New Jersey Medical School at Rutgers Health received a multi-million-dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study how previous infections help or hinder the body's subsequent response to unrelated pathogens that cause lung disease.

The five-year grant will support the work of immunologists William C. Gause, Amariliz Rivera and Mark Siracusa, who will examine how mice fight lung infection after exposure to various parasites, fungi and viruses. Full article in Rutgers Today.


 

               

In April 2023, Dr. Yuan-Xiang Tao and his team in Department of Anesthesiology and Center for Immunity and Inflammation published an exciting work in Brain that identified a novel non-coding RNA named sensory neuron-specific lncRNA (SS-lncRNA), for its expression exclusively in the neurons of dorsal root ganglion (DRG) and trigeminal ganglion. They reported that SS-lncRNA relieved neuropathic pain through hnRNPM-mediated KCNN1 rescue. These findings suggest that SS-lncRNA may offer a new therapeutic strategy specific for neuropathic pain.

https://academic.oup.com/brain/advance-article/doi/10.1093/brain/awad110/7100983?searchresult=1


In February 2023, Dr. Yuan-Xiang Tao’s lab published a paper in Br J Anaesth showing that intrathecal NIS-lncRNA antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) leads to a long-lasting analgesic effect on neuropathic pain caused by nerve trauma, chemotherapy, or diabetes mellitus. This work followed up his team’s previous exciting findings published in J Clin Invest last year (July 2022), which reported that a new identified nerve injury-specific long-noncoding RNA (NIS-lncRNA) promoted neuropathic pain by increasing the expression of CCL2, a small cytokine. Given that ASO strategy is an FDA-approved in clinical treatments of some neurological disorders, NIS-lncRNA ASOs may have potential application in clinical managements of neuropathic pain. A patent related to this work has been applied. This project is funded by a five-year $3.5-million NIH HEAL Initiative grant (2019-2024).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0007091222005682?via%3Dihub

https://www.jci.org/articles/view/153563


 

Dr. Tessa Bergsbaken, Assistant Professor in Center for Immunity and Inflammation and Department of Pathology, Immunology & Laboratory Medicine, and colleagues published a study in the November 2022 issue of Science Immunology that uses a newly developed mouse model to understand the unique functions of tissue-resident memory T cell subsets. Tissue-resident memory T (Trm) cells are lodged within barrier surfaces and are critical for preventing infection with pathogens that invade these tissues. Dr. Helen Fung, the first author on this paper, found that a small subset of CD103Trm cells were the primary responders to secondary infection. CD103Trm cells expanded within the tissue and displayed enhanced TCR-mediated reactivation and cytokine production compared to their CD103+ counterparts. These studies reveal the limited recall potential of CD103+ Trm subsets and the role of CD103 Trm cells as central memory-like T cells within peripheral tissues. Ultimately, these studies suggest that vaccines that lead to the generation of CD103Trm cells within barrier surfaces could have enhanced efficacy. The findings were highlighted in an article in Rutgers Today...Read more

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciimmunol.abl9925


In September 2022, Jianya Peng and Chandler Sy from Dr. Mark Siracusa’s lab published a paper in PNAS showing an important role for monocytes in maintaining central nervous system homeostasis following an intestinal parasite challenge. These studies represent an important contribution to the rapidly emerging field of neuroimmunology and suggest that infections occurring at distal sites can dramatically alter the host brain. These findings further showed that a previous infection may make the host less susceptible to subsequent forms of neuroinflammation. Given that neuroinflammation is associated with disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, this work could inform the development of new therapeutic targets to treat neurogenerative conditions.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2201645119


In August 2022, Darine El-Naccache published a paper in Cell Reports showing an important role for adenosine in triggering type 2 immune responses through binding the Adenosine A2b receptor expressed on intestinal epithelial cells. These studies were part of her Ph.D. dissertation research in Dr. Gause's laboratory, and the studies were done in collaboration with Dr. George Hasko at Columbia University. These findings further showed that the adenosine was derived from extracellular ATP and essentially functions as an endogenous danger signal likely triggered through tissue damage occurring as helminth parasites cross the intestinal barrier. The findings were highlighted in an article in Rutgers Today...Read more 

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(22)00959-7



In August 2022, Dr. Aimee M. Beaulieu, Assistant Professor and Chancellor Scholar, Center for Immunity and Inflammation and Department of Microbiology, Biochemistry, & Molecular Genetics, and colleagues published a study in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrating that the cytokine, IL-33, is a key regulator of pregnancy progression and type 2 immune responses at the maternal-fetal interface in mice. This collaborative study included researchers from Dr. Beaulieu’s team, and from the teams of Dr. Nataki Douglas in the Center for Immunity and Inflammation and Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Health at Rutgers NJMS and Dr. Ripla Arora at Michigan State University.  Dr. Nuriban Valero-Pacheco, the first author of the paper, demonstrated that pregnant mice lacking the Il33 gene exhibit diverse defects in key physiological and cellular processes in the uterine microenvironment that support pregnancy progression in mice, resulting in impaired fetal and placental development.  These defects were associated with diminished Type 2 immune responses by uterine lymphocytes and myeloid cells at the maternal-fetal interface during early pregnancy. Ultimately, this work could inform future efforts to target IL-33 signaling to treat or prevent pregnancy disorders in women.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2123267119


 

 

In February 2022, Dr. Jason Weinstein, Assistant Professor and Chancellor Scholar, Center for Immunity and Inflammation and Department of Medicine, and his team published a paper in Immunity, identifying a novel Tbet+CD11c+ B cell population that give rise to a unique memory subset enabling rapid and robust recall responses during acute viral infections. Their work demonstrated that a subset of CD4 T cells known as a T follicular helper cell, was specifically required for the generation of Tbet+CD11c+ B cells. Moreover, their work shows that at the resolution of infection, these B cells localized to the red pulp of the spleen, forming a competitive memory subset that contributed to antibody production and secondary germinal center seeding upon re-infection. Read More

 


William C. Gause, PhD and Patricia Fitzgerald-Bocarsly, PhD were recently named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Read More




Dr. William Gause and Dr. Mark Siracusa and their teams published a paper in Cell reports showing that during helminth infection, monocytes recruited to the lung can assume an alveolar-like macrophage phenotype and differentially express markers associated with tissue remodeling and allergic inflammation, including arginase-1 (Arg1). They further showed that Arg1 mediates helminth killing through depletion of arginine, indicating nutrient deprivation as a novel host resistance mechanism against nematode parasites. Read More



Dr. Yosuke Kumamoto
Assistant Professor, Center for Immunity and Inflammation and Department of Pathology, Immunology & Laboratory Medicine, and his team published a paper in Science Immunology, describing a novel role of a migratory dendritic cell subset in scanning the specificity of CD4T cells in the lymph node. Dr. Naoya Tatsum, the leading author of the paper, demonstrated that depletion of migratory cDC2 cells results in impaired retention of naive CD4T cells in the lymph node and reduced efficacy in CD4T cell priming and proposed a new model whereby migratory cDC2 cells function as an immunological "display window" to attract CD4T cells for scanning their repertoire. Read More


 

Asthma and allergies are chronic health conditions that continue to adversely impact the quality of life for many around the world. Thanks to exciting breakthroughs by Mark Siracusa, a researcher at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, there may be early signs of light at the end of the tunnel. Read More


Centers of Excellence at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School – the newly established Center for COVID-19 Response and Pandemic Preparedness (CCRP2), the Public Health Research Institute (PHRI), the Center for Immunity and Inflammation and the Center for Emerging Pathogens – combine to form a new institute to pursue novel approaches to detect, treat and prevent a wide range of current and emerging diseases caused by infectious agents and harmful inflammation.

 

Institute for Infectious and Inflammatory Diseases (i³D), is expected to act as a springboard to further develop this already strong area of research excellence at Rutgers. The institute is located within the Rutgers International Center for Public Health, an advanced research facility for infectious disease research on the Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences Campus in Newark.

Research at i³D focus on the breakthrough field that examines the link between infectious and inflammatory diseases.  Dysfunction of the immune system has recently been implicated in diseases that include AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, influenza, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), cardiovascular disease, diabetes, autism, asthma and obesity.  Studies have suggested that dysfunction of the immune system is an important common basis for many of these diseases. For example, estimates by the National Institutes of Health indicate that up to 23.5 million people in the U.S. are afflicted by autoimmune diseases such as Inflammatory Bowel Disease and Type 1 diabetes, and for unknown reasons their prevalence is increasing. 

In other diseases and conditions, including cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorders, studies indicate a significant contributing role for harmful inflammation.  It is now anticipated that understanding interactions between infection, inflammation and the immune system will lead to novel treatments and advanced diagnostics for a wide range of current and emerging diseases.

Recent discoveries by i³D scientists are leading to novel approaches that use the body’s immune response to combat inflammation and help patients manage both acute and chronic diseases.  Currently, there are limited effective treatments for inflammatory diseases besides steroids, which can have harmful side effects.  Research teams focus on new approaches to regulate harmful inflammatory responses, in some cases harnessing immune regulatory pathways that prevent tissue-damaging inflammatory responses.

Other groups focus on improved detection of diseases at the earliest stages of infection when targeted treatments may be most effective.  Recent studies by researchers at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School already have led them to develop breakthrough technologies in molecular biology that are now used for more rapid detection of tuberculosis.   Working together, these research teams share state-of-the-art methodologies and conceptual breakthroughs leading to more rapid translation of basic discoveries into novel and improved diagnostics and treatments.

The more specific goals of the new institute include:

  •  Developing new treatments, diagnostics and preventive measures for infectious and inflammatory diseases

  •  Moving new therapies and treatments from bench to bedside more quickly

  •  Helping to break the cycle of poverty and disease in impoverished communities locally and worldwide

  •  Offering continuing education to all health professionals as well as science writers and health educators

  •  Sharing research and information with the public through publications, blogs, social media and video

William C. Gause, senior associate dean for research at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, said: “Dysfunction of the immune system is increasingly recognized as contributing to a broad spectrum of infectious and noninfectious diseases.  The specific focus of our new institute provides a unique opportunity to build an innovative and significant program of biomedical research excellence for Newark and the State of New Jersey. It provides the opportunity to develop innovative perspectives and insights for the development of new treatments and diagnostics that can be rapidly translated to the clinic.”

 Dysfunction of the immune system is increasingly recognized as contributing to a broad spectrum of infectious and noninfectious diseases. The specific focus of our new institute provides a unique opportunity to build an innovative and significant program of biomedical research excellence for Newark and the State of New Jersey. It provides the opportunity to develop innovative perspectives and insights for the development of new treatments and diagnostics that can be rapidly translated to the clinics.