Innate immunity and pathogen sensing at barrier organs

My lab aims to understand the basic biology of the human innate immune system of barrier organs, such as the skin and airway. By focusing on a key intracellular complex known as the inflammasome, we aim to address two questions: 1) How does the innate immune system distinguish pathogens from harmless commensal microbes, and 2) how does dysregulated innate immune response arise and lead to auto-immune diseases? In the past few years, my lab has discovered the first pathogen-derived ligand for the human NLRP1 inflammasome (Robinson et al, Science, 2020), solved its cryo-EM structure in both the pre- and post-activation state (Gong et al, Nature Comms, 2021; Huang et al, Nature, 2021), co-discovered a new Mendelian auto-inflammatory disease caused by DPP9 mutations (Carapas et al, Biorxiv, 2021) and more recently uncovered a surprising connection between ribosome function and inflammasome activation (Robinson et al, Biorixv, 2022). In the next few years, we will continue to investigate 1) how the inflammasome complex contributes to antimicrobial immunity using in vivo and human organoid models and 2) explore pharmacologic strategies to target the NLRP1 inflammasome to treat human diseases.