James Lee
New York University, NY·Microbiology & Immunology·Early-career
Every cell in the body constantly advertises what is happening inside it by displaying short protein fragments on its surface. Immune cells inspect these fragments and destroy any cell showing something abnormal, which is how infected and cancerous cells are eliminated.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Biochemistry
Biophysics
- Topics
major histocompatibility complex
antigen presentation
antigen processing
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2031
What they work on
- Map the complete route of peptide antigen loading onto MHC-I molecules using a chemical biology strategy applied both in living cells and in reconstituted systems rebuilt from purified components.
- Visualize the dynamic macromolecular machines that regulate MHC-I assembly in native-like environments using single-particle cryo-electron microscopy together with biochemical and biophysical methods.
- Determine the largely uncharacterized strategies that herpesviruses and poxviruses use to disrupt antigen presentation and escape immune surveillance.
- Engineer synthetic immunomodulators based on viral evasion mechanisms, testing whether they can enhance immune responses against infection and tumors or suppress aberrant immune activation.
More about the research
The display platform is the major histocompatibility complex class-I molecule, or MHC-I. Despite how central this is to immunity, remarkably little is known about how a cell chooses which fragments to put on show, largely because the loading machinery is complicated and there have been no tools to watch it work directly.
Why it matters
Understanding how cells pick the fragments they display determines how well the immune system can spot an infected or cancerous cell. Tools built from viral immune-evasion proteins could be used to boost immune responses in cancer immunotherapy and viral infection, or to dampen them in autoimmune disease and transplant rejection, where the immune system attacks tissue it should tolerate.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Stefan Oliver
Stanford University, CA·Biophysics
Determine the near-atomic structure of the varicella-zoster virus gB/gH-gL complex, the machinery that fuses viral and cell membranes, using single-particle cryo-electron microscopy on complexes kept in their native lipid environment.
James Chen
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Biophysics·Early-career
Purify the cell-wall proteins PonA1 and CrgA and their partner complexes directly from Mycobacterium tuberculosis and M. smegmatis, and determine their 3D structures by single-particle cryo-EM.
Scott Bailey
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Biochemistry
Determine how CRISPR-associated proteins use small guide RNAs to locate and destroy foreign DNA or RNA in prokaryotes, using cryo-EM structures together with biochemical, biophysical and cell-based assays.
The school
New York University: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 540 research doctorates a year.
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