Huang Lab
Principal Investigator: Lu Huang
Institution: Boston Medical Center (Boston, MA)
Primary Subfield: Immunology
Recruitment Status: ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Project Summary/Abstract Our current vaccine development strategies against tuberculosis (TB) focus on the induction of adaptive immune responses, but that may not be sufficient to mount effective immunity. Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) resides in heterogenous lung macrophages with various levels of permissiveness in the presence of the same immune pressure. Among them, lung alveolar macrophages (AMs) are highly permissive cells, which facilitate rapid growth of Mtb and promote disease dissemination at the early stage of infection. However, the underlying mechanism that determines this permissive nature of AMs during Mtb infection remains elusive. Identifying determinants regulating the response of AMs to Mtb is thus essential for the development of new therapeutics and novel vaccine platforms. While AMs are derived from embryonic precursors in naïve mice, they can be replaced by bone marrow-derived monocytes during infection. It is unknown whether the origin of AMs change and how the altered ontogeny impacts the permissiveness and functions of AMs during Mtb infection. In addition to ontogeny, our previous work has demonstrated that lung macrophage metabolism plays a critical r…
Active NIH Awards
- 7R01AI184960-03: Ontogeny and metabolism of lung alveolar macrophages in tuberculosis (2026)
- 7R21AI188044-02: Single-cell spatial-temporal understanding of the role of macrophage subsets in maintenance of lesion biology and local Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection outcome. (2025)
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