PATHOGEN IMMUNITY, SIGNALING AND THERAPEUTIC APPLICATIONS (PISTA)

Principal Investigator: Nuria Izquierdo-Useros

Presentation

The world is becoming particularly vulnerable to emerging pathogens that thrive in new geographical areas due to climate warming and globalization trends. Although infectious diseases can be contained by host defenses, pathogens evolve to counteract human immunity. Our goal is to understand the underlying biology and basic aspects of human infection to develop new therapeutic strategies, and to steer the rational design of broad antimicrobial treatments to overcome multidrug resistance.

To attain this aim, our group uses interdisciplinary cutting-edge technologies to perform multiple screenings integrating genomics, transcriptomics, high-throughput proteomics, super-resolution microscopy and functional inhibitory analyses, from the single-cell up to the tissue/organ level.

Keywords: Emerging pathogens, immune responses, host susceptibility, HIV-1 co-infections, host-directed therapies, personalized treatments

Principal Investigator

Nuria Izquierdo-Useros

Nuria Izquierdo-Useros is a biologist from Madrid who obtained her PhD from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) in 2009. Her research focuses on the interplay between antigen presenting cells and enveloped viruses, and includes studies of the...

Curriculum

Strategic lines

Research lines

In particular, we focus in three main areas of research:

1) Understanding early host-pathogen interactions, innate immune responses and cellular sensing that influence susceptibility to infection, modulate pathogenesis and disease outcome, or response to treatments and vaccines. In this regard, we are interested in:

Identifying host molecular mechanisms associated with susceptibility to infection, disease progression and transmissibility.
Analyzing genetic loss-of-function variants to study how the lack of a particular molecular pathway impacts on infection.
Characterizing differences between individuals in response to treatments or vaccines to inform and optimize efficacy.
Addressing biological sex differences implicated in susceptibility to infection, and disease outcome to reduce the current gap knowledge.

2) Studying co-infections with emerging pathogens and HIV-1, to specifically tackle the limitations and disadvantages of current treatments.

3) Improving current treatments and vaccines to combat emerging pathogens that lack specific antimicrobial drugs, to address drug resistance and to develop broad spectrum therapies for forthcoming but still unknown pathogens. In particular, we focus on the development of innovative antimicrobial strategies focused on exploiting the host immune response. Our aim is to fortify the global health system while fostering personalized treatments.