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Many congratulations to Dr. Ya-Jen Chang for her tremendous research work for the past years and a recent publication in Nature Immunology in May 2011.
Dr. Ya-Jen Chang received her Ph.D. in Pharmacology from College of Medicine at National Taiwan University, Taiwan in Jan 2005. The title of her thesis is "Infection induced inflammation and carcinogenesisroles".
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She is primarily interested in investigating the signal transduction pathways regarding cancer biology, infectious disease, and immuno-modulation issues. Through 2005 to 2008, she joined Dr. Alice L. Yu's lab at the Genomics Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, as a postdoctoral researcher. She evaluated and investigated several novel synthetic NKT-stimulatory glycolipids. After that, she moved to Boston and joined the lab of Dr. Dale T. Umetsu at Children's Hospital of Boston in May 2008 to continue her postdoctoral training. She now is an instructor in Pediatrics/Immunology and works on the issues regarding asthma and influenza virus, with special focus on immuno-modulatory role of NKT.
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The title of Dr. Chang's recent Nature Immunology paper is "Innate lymphoid cells mediate influenza-induced airway hyper-reactivity independently of adaptive immunity". Here is the abstract for the paper:
Patients with asthma, a major public health problem, are at high risk for serious disease from influenza virus infection, but the pathogenic mechanisms by which influenza A causes airway disease and asthma are not fully known. Chang and colleagues show in a mouse model that influenza infection acutely induced airway hyper-reactivity (AHR), a cardinal feature of asthma, independently of T helper type 2 (T(H)2) cells and adaptive immunity. Instead, influenza infection induced AHR through a previously unknown pathway that required the interleukin 13 (IL-13)-IL-33 axis and cells of the non-T cell, non-B cell innate lymphoid type called 'natural helper cells'. Infection with influenza A virus, which activates the NLRP3 inflammasome, resulted in much more production of IL-33 by alveolar macrophages, which in turn activated natural helper cells producing substantial IL-13. The background and significance of Dr. Chang's work has been reported at The-Scientist (http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/58184/)
If anyone is interested in more information, you are welcome to contact Dr. Chang via Email: Ya-Jen.Chang@childrens.harvard.edu.
Cheers
HMS-CSSA
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