Alexendar Perez
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Microbiology & Immunology·Early-career
Sepsis is a runaway, self-damaging immune reaction to infection that strikes roughly 50 million people and kills about 11 million worldwide each year. Older age is among the strongest predictors of dying from it, and immune function broadly weakens with age, but the reasons remain unclear.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Genetics
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
sepsis
transposable elements
retrotransposons
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2030
What they work on
- Chart how de-repression of transposable elements in immune cells varies with patient age and with sepsis, testing whether it accompanies decline in immune quality.
- Apply machine learning to immune cell expression data to quantify immune aging and identify transposable elements, or families of them, that predict ICU mortality and secondary infections.
- Use whole exome sequencing of septic patient samples to find mutations associated with high transposable element expression.
- Test with CRISPR in immortalized immune cells whether patient-derived mutations and candidates such as AGO2 and SIRT6 cause transposable element de-repression, and compare their transcriptomes to high-expression sepsis samples by RNA sequencing.
More about the research
This project pursues one candidate explanation: transposable elements, repetitive stretches of DNA that can copy and move themselves around the genome and are normally kept silenced.
Why it matters
Sepsis remains a leading cause of death and its immune dysfunction is poorly understood, leaving few targeted therapies. Linking transposable element activity to immune aging and intensive care outcomes could yield markers that flag patients at highest risk of death or secondary infection, and could point toward personalized, genotype-guided treatments of the kind already used in cancer.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Marlene Starr
University of Kentucky, KY·Medicine & Clinical Research
Compare sepsis pathophysiology in patients stratified by obesity status, with a focus on immune alterations, using samples collected from these patient populations.
Scott Devine
University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD·Genetics
Build a comprehensive resource of full-length, human-specific LINE-1 (FL-L1Hs) source elements, the retrotransposon copies able to produce new insertions, for studying L1 mobilization in human tissues and tumors.
Lynn Jorde
University of Utah, UT·Genetics
Test whether a person's germline (inherited) mutation rate tracks their somatic mutation rate, using whole-genome sequencing of blood DNA collected from the same Utah CEPH pedigree members at three time points over 35 years.
The school
University of California-San Francisco: 89 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 164 research doctorates a year.
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