Luciana Berod, PhD

Research Interests:

Our immune system works in an orchestrated manner to protect us against pathogens and foreign substances. Failure of this system leads to chronic infection, autoimmune diseases or cancer. In our group “Immunomodulation” at the Paul Klein Center for Immune intervention at the UMC, we investigate:

• how immune cells can be influenced by changes in metabolism and how metabolic pathways can be targeted for therapeutic purposes.
• how metabolism influences posttranslational modifications in immune cells and thus influences immune cell function.

The focus of our work is the balance between regulatory T cells and inflammatory T cells and their activation by dendritic cells in different infection, cancer and autoimmune disease models.