Erlebacher Lab
Principal Investigator: Adrian Erlebacher
Institution: University of California, San Francisco (San Francisco, CA)
Primary Subfield: Immunology
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT A central question in reproductive immunology is how the fetus and placenta avoid being rejected by the maternal immune system. Despite the substantial progress made on this question in recent years, many key knowledge gaps remain. These gaps not only prevent us from leveraging underlying mechanisms to induce antigen-specific immune tolerance in the clinical arena, but also limit investigation into the pathogenesis of intrauterine growth restriction, spontaneous abortion, preeclampsia, and preterm labor, i.e., pregnancy complications that may all involve aberrant activation of the maternal immune system to placental antigens. Recently, our laboratory has described key roles for B cell-mediated antigen presentation and antigen glycosylation in suppressing immune responses to placental antigens in mice. Specifically, we found that a surrogate model antigen expressed by trophoblasts (t-mOVA) is presented to maternal CD4 T cells exclusively by antigen-specific B cells, and that these B cells are suppressed through the actions of t-mOVA’s heavily sialylated N-linked glycans, thus in turn suppressing the CD4 T cells. This major new line of investigation raises im…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01AI184482-03: Glycan regulation of fetomaternal tolerance (2026)
- 1R37AI198470-01: Fibroblast-immune cell interactions in the epigenetic control of parturition timing (2026)
- 5P50HD112034-04: Administrative Core (2026)
- 5P50HD112034-04: Immunological, epigenetic and developmental determinants of early pregnancy success (2026)
- 5P50HD112034-04: Epigenetics of decidual inflammation (2026)
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