Centre for Innate Immunity & Infectious Disease

Gastrointestinal Infection and Inflammation

Laboratory Head: Dr Richard Ferrero

Gastrointestinal Infection and Inflammation

Research in this laboratory is focused on understanding how the host immune system recognises and responds to invading micro-organisms.  A key area of interest is the stomach disease-causing bacterium, Helicobacter pylori.

The laboratory uses H. pylori as a model of infection to study how the host immune system recognises disease-causing (pathogenic) bacteria by specifically investigating the role of molecules from the innate arm of the host immune system in the initial responses to H. pylori.

 Among the important findings of the teams previous work was the identification of the key role that the innate immune molecule, NOD1, plays in these responses. Moreover, the lab team has demonstrated that NOD1 recognises fragments of peptidoglycan, a component of the bacterial cell wall, that are presented into host cells via a specialised delivery system, known as a bacterial type IV secretion system (T4SS). 
These systems mediate the delivery or translocation of molecules from the invading bacteria into the host cell and are associated with bacterial pathogenicity.

Some of the current lab aims are:

• To elucidate the mechanism by which the H. pylori uses its TFSS to deliver cell wall peptidoglycan to NOD1;
• To identify novel mechanisms of peptidoglycan delivery to host cells;
• To clarify the role of NOD1 in the generation of responses by the adaptive arm of the immune system; and
• To investigate the role of NOD1 during experimental and natural infections in mice and humans, respectively. 

The ultimate aim of this work is to better understand the pathophysiology of the inflammatory processes that precede gastric cancer formation, a condition that causes millions of deaths world-wide each year.