Intestinal Immune Responses to Bacteria

Dr. Stephen McSorley's current research

Salmonella typhi causes typhoid fever, a common gastrointestinal infection in many developing nations.  Current typhoid vaccines are only moderately effective or unsafe for use by the very young or elderly.  Research in our laboratory focuses on understanding the activation of innate and adaptive immune responses to Salmonella with a view to development of novel typhoid vaccines.  Our laboratory is also actively developing a novel model of antigen-specific colitis and attempting to identify how and where T cells responsive to normal enteric flora are activated in vivo.

Recent publications

Ravindran R, Rusch L, Itano A, Jenkins MK, McSorley SJ.  CCR6-dependent recruitment of blood phagocytes is necessary for rapid CD4 T cell responses to local bacterial infection.  Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007 104:12075.

Srinivasan A, Salazar-Gonzalez RM, Jarcho M, Sandau MM, Lefrancois L, McSorley SJ.  
Innate immune activation of CD4 T cells in salmonella-infected mice is dependent on IL-18.  J Immunol. 2007 178:6342.

Salazar-Gonzalez RM, Niess JH, Zammit DJ, Ravindran R, Srinivasan A, Maxwell JR, Stoklasek T, Yadav R, Williams IR, Gu X, McCormick BA, Pazos MA, Vella AT, Lefrancois L, Reinecker HC, McSorley SJ. CCR6-mediated dendritic cell activation of pathogen-specific T cells in Peyer's patches.  Immunity. 2006 24:623.

For more research of Dr. McSorley, go to Microbiology, Immunology & Cancer Biology (MICaB) Ph.D. Graduate Program.