Stephanie Eisenbarth
Northwestern University, IL·Microbiology & Immunology
Antibodies come in classes, and each class does a different job. IgA guards moist surfaces such as the gut and airways.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
IgA
IgE
class switch recombination
- Grants
- 4 known grants, through Jun 2031
What they work on
- Test whether gut B cells must switch to IgG1 before switching to IgA to generate the highest-affinity IgA after oral immunization in mice, and map where this sequential switching occurs in mouse and human Peyer's patches using imaging and spatial transcriptomics.
- Define how germinal centers and T follicular helper cells shape antigen-specific gut IgA, including antibody mutation, affinity selection, and the isotype and recall capacity of memory B cells after mucosal immunization.
- Identify which gut invariant natural killer T cells, T cells that recognize lipids, are activated by alpha-galactosylceramide plus peanut, and which cytokines and co-stimulatory signals they use, via flow cytometry and single-cell RNA sequencing.
- Screen naturally occurring food and microbial lipids for the ability to trigger peanut-specific IgE, and use CD1 transgenic mice to test whether human-type lipid-restricted T cells drive the same response.
- Determine which step of the IgE B cell response IL-13 controls, class switching, plasma cell differentiation or survival, using mouse and human germinal-center-like B cell cultures plus mass spectrometry of IgE sugar groups.
- Test with a conditional Il13ra1 knockout mouse whether B cells need the IL-13 receptor to make high-affinity IgE and cause anaphylaxis, and dissect the downstream STAT6-dependent and -independent signals with phospho flow, ChIP-seq and RNA-seq.
More about the research
IgE drives allergy, including anaphylaxis, a severe whole-body allergic reaction. B cells make antibodies, usually with help from T cells, and they can switch from making one class to another. These projects ask how the immune system decides which antibody to produce in response to foods, allergens and oral vaccines, mostly in mice but also in human cells and tissue. A fourth award involves a consortium studying neutrophils, a type of white blood cell, in human lung disease.
Why it matters
Food allergy affects more than 32 million Americans and has no cure, in part because it is unclear how harmful food-specific IgE is made; mapping the cells and lipids involved could reveal ways to prevent or treat it. Because most vaccines fail to elicit IgA, understanding how durable gut IgA forms could inform mucosal vaccine design and interventions in celiac disease and inflammatory bowel disease. The consortium work targets neutrophil-driven lung diseases such as pneumonia, transplant lung failure and asthma.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ari B Molofsky
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Microbiology & Immunology
Test how early injury-associated myofibroblasts, which depend on TGFβ signaling and macrophages, limit brain lesion size and loss of function in mouse models of brain injury.
Elia D Tait Wojno
University of Washington, WA·Microbiology & Immunology
Test how Notch signaling inside basophils controls where they sit in the large intestine and how they contact CD4+ T cells during Trichuris muris worm infection, including a role for alpha4 integrin.
Stephen Dreskin
University of Colorado Denver/Anschutz Medical Campus, CO·Microbiology & Immunology
Optimize IgE binding to known 2S albumin peptides and discover new ones by positional amino acid screening, which systematically substitutes each residue in a peptide to find the strongest-binding version.
The school
Northwestern University: 71 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 536 research doctorates a year.
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