T cells play a critical role in protection from infectious disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and asthma. Helper T cells coordinate the adaptive and innate immune responses and deliver essential survival signals for the generation of cytotoxic memory T cells, antibody responses, and protective immunity. A better understanding of T cell activation and memory formation may enable improvement of infectious disease vaccines, help with the discovery of cancer treatments, and decrease Alzheimer's disease and asthma development.
The main areas of research in the Weber Lab are: 1) Understanding the molecular basis of T cell activation and improving the T cell memory response to infectious disease 2) Engineering improved immunological proteins to combat cancer 3) Determining the involvement of the immune system in Alzheimer's disease and 4) Understanding how environmental exposures influences asthma development.
