Researchers identify potential approaches to modify the vaginal microbiome
Insights may lead to more effective treatments for bacterial vaginosis and improve women’s health outcomes globally.
Dr. Douglas Kwon is a physician scientist and Director of Clinical Operations at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard. He has a clinical practice in the division of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital. He received his M.D. Ph.D. degrees from New York University and then underwent Internal Medicine training at the University of California, San Francisco and New York Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. He then completed his training in the combined Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital Infectious Disease fellowship program.
The focus of his current research is understanding the role of mucosal tissues in HIV acquisition and disease progression. His lab is involved in developing and applying new technologies to overcome the technical barriers that have impeded our understanding of mucosal immunity to date. This includes the application of novel techniques and functional assays to assess HIV-specific immune responses and the microbiome at mucosal sites.
See further details at www.kwonlab.org
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Mass General Infectious Diseases
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The focus of the Kwon lab is the application of new technologies to the study of immune responses against HIV at mucosal surfaces.
Mucosal surfaces represent both the primary site of HIV transmission and the largest reservoir of viral replication. Despite this, the immune response to HIV has largely been studied in the peripheral blood, which contains just 2-3% of all lymphocytes- a small minority relative to the 60-90% of the body's T and B cells that reside at mucosal sites. One of the greatest barriers to a more detailed understanding of these responses is the inherently small amount of material that can be obtained from mucosal sampling. We are therefore employing new technologies, such as high throughput sequencing and nanowell technologies, to simultaneously capture multiple measures of viral, metagenomic, and adaptive immune factors important for HIV immunity and pathogenesis.
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Insights may lead to more effective treatments for bacterial vaginosis and improve women’s health outcomes globally.