De'Broski R. Herbert

The over-arching goal of my research program is to use parasitic organisms as a guide to investigate basic mechanisms of host immunity, inflammation, and wound healing. I have been continuously NIH-R01 funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 2007 and have authored 61 manuscripts published in journals that include: Science, Science Immunology, Nature Medicine, Nature Communications, Immunity, JEM, PNAS, PLoS Pathogens, and the Journal of Immunology. Most of this work has focused on the immune response to parasitic helminths, organisms that are the likely evolutionary driving force for Type 2 immunity. Helminths are a major cause of disease in impoverished populations (~2-3 billion people) and biomedical research focused on parasitic helminths has been a fertile ground for scientific discovery.

Helminths such as hookworms pose a formidable challenge to the host immune system regarding their large size, morphological complexity, and the host tissue niches they occupy. While infectious larval stages can cause tremendous damage to host tissues as they invade and migrate, the hematophagous nature of adult stages can cause persistent injury during feeding. Surprisingly, most helminth species can survive for years, even decades in their hosts due to a variety of mechanisms including those that suppress and evade host immunity. Given this complex biology, research projects based in my lab (and most collaborative work) focus on the mechanisms that initiate Type 2 responses, those that drive tissue repair, and requirements for host protective immunity at the sites where worms invade and reside (e.g., skin, respiratory tract, and intestine). Given the widely held notion that allergic inflammation is due to maladaptive Type 2 responses that initially evolved to deal with helminths, our work has broad relevance to both infectious and non-infectious disease.