Alejandro Aballay
Professor
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
Department of Genetics
The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
McGovern Medical School
Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics
Alejandro Aballay's lab has a broad research program encompassing genetics, functional genomics and neurobiological approaches to study mechanisms involved in the control of immune responses against microbial pathogens. Immune activation needs to be fine-tuned since deficient or excessive inflammation can lead to cancer or other conditions such as Crohn’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, atherosclerosis, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. Recent studies from the Aballay Lab indicate that different immune and cellular homeostatic mechanisms are regulated at the organismal level by the nervous system. The lab's research has demonstrated that specific neurons suppress innate immunity in the intestinal cells of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, in part by down-modulating a mitogen-activated protein kinase signaling pathway similar to the mammalian p38 MAPK pathway that is highly conserved across metazoans. The lab found that G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) participate in neural circuits that control a conserved p38/PMK-1 MAPK immune pathway and non-canonical and canonical XBP-1 unfolded protein response pathways that are expressed in non-neuronal tissues and that are necessary to alleviate the increased demand on protein folding during immune activation.
Aballay Laboratory | MD Anderson Cancer Center
Education & Training
PhD, Nacional de Cuyo University Medical School, 1998