Jinhee Lee

Background

About Jinhee Lee

Decoding myeloid cell functions may hold the key to a cure for some diseases that are still devastating humanity, such as TB. Myeloid cells comprise a divers subpopulations that are either protective or permissive cells. My work is geared toward identifying myeloid subtypes with the polarizing roles in M. tuberculosis infection, and ultimately discovering host factors that determine host immunity and bacterial pathogenesis. My strategy to improve host protective immune responses as follows: 1. identifying myeloid sub-populations that hamper protective host response using multi-color flow cytometry 2. Determining effector T cell efficacies on each myeloid subset to distinct protective and detrimental populations. discovering targets responsible for suppression through gene chip analysis of the sub-populations 4. validating and testing target molecules for drug development Having working on tuberculosis, I have identified a myeloid subset primarily responsible for bacterial growth and a set of genes are highly expressed in the subset. The goal of my study is to elucidate the role of the genes and develop a drug therapy that neutralize the supressive population.