Wood Lab
Principal Investigator: David Kevin Wood
Institution: University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN)
Primary Subfield: Immunology
Recruitment Status: Inquire for rotation/fellowship opportunities
Research Focus
Project Summary Chronic inflammation is a central factor in a major fraction of all human disease burden. In chronic inflammation, immune cells mediate a dysregulated inflammatory response that persists despite the removal of the initial insult, suggesting stable, steady-state dynamics between immune and tissue cells. Macrophages are key players in this process, mediated by their status as central effectors of tissue inflammation and their high plasticity for both inflammatory and anti-inflammatory states, as well as tissue-specific functionality. This process of transition from a healthy to a chronically inflamed tissue steady state involves competition between trafficking and invading macrophages from the periphery vs. resident ones, conversion between inflammatory states, and crosstalk with neighboring tissue cells that is hypothesized to be tissue-specific. Existing tools for studying chronic inflammation are limited in their ability to provide a mechanistic understanding of these processes. They use overly high doses of inflammatory agents, which cause non- specific responses with little predictive value. The macrophages used are not authentic resident cells; they lack the cor…
Active NIH Awards
- 1R01AI200568-01: Engineering Immunocompetent Human Tissues to Define Inflammatory State Transitions (2026)
- 5R01HL177019-02: Discovery and validation of single cell biomarkers for clinical outcome in sickle cell disease (2026)
- 1R01HL177019-01: Discovery and validation of single cell biomarkers for clinical outcome in sickle cell disease (2025)
- 5R01CA245550-05: A platform to functionally sort and analyze tumor cells within combinatorial metastatic micorenvironments (2024)
- 5R01HL132906-08: Developing a multiscale understanding of biophysical processes in sickle cell disease (2024)
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