One of the biggest hurdles to the future widespread use of cell-based therapies is the fact that therapeutic cells will be rejected if they come from an allogeneic (foreign) donor.  And, in most cases, it will not be economically realistic to generate patient-specific iPSCs or other cell types given the enormous costs and time needed to do so. 

I’m involved in projects that aim to genetically engineer hypoimmunogenic pluripotent cells that autonomously resist immune rejection when transplanted into foreign recipients.  The ultimate goal is to generate universal, pluripotent cells that can differentiated into any therapeutic cell of interest and transplanted into foreign hosts without the use of dangerous immune suppressants. 

I’m also involved in several other projects that lean on the Nagy lab expertise of CRISPR targeting, cell suicide systems, and any form of cell and gene editing.

Before joining the Nagy lab, I was involved in projects that tried to understand the inflammatory cell response to Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterial cause of tuberculosis disease in humans.