Louis Cohen
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY·Microbiology & Immunology
Crohn's disease is a chronic inflammatory disease of the gut. Many patients stop responding to one treatment after another, and each new drug tends to work less well for patients whose earlier treatments failed.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
Crohn's disease
inflammatory bowel disease
hematopoietic stem cells
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Apr 2030
What they work on
- Profile the hematopoietic (blood-forming) stem cell and progenitor populations that are associated with treatment-resistant Crohn's disease, drawing on patients who received autologous stem cell transplantation.
- Characterize how hematopoietic stem cells from patients with treatment-resistant Crohn's disease function, and how these functions relate to treatment outcomes and to the production of abnormal myeloid cells.
- Explore a poorly defined niche for hematopoietic stem cells within the intestine, to learn how myeloid progenitors support gut cell populations that either sustain disease or promote healing.
- Define how Cbeg5, a sugar-binding lectin made by common human gut bacteria, regulates distinct myeloid immune cell populations.
- Evaluate whether Cbeg5 could be developed as a therapy for inflammatory bowel disease, and map the wider network of host–microbe interactions controlled by bacterial lectins.
More about the research
Because nearly all current treatments target inflammation, the work explores causes of disease that lie outside inflammation itself. It does so along two lines: the blood-forming stem cells that produce the immune cells found in the gut, and the carbohydrate-binding proteins that gut bacteria use to communicate with the body.
Why it matters
Patients with Crohn's disease who do not respond to anti-inflammatory drugs have few options. Identifying stem cell dysfunction behind treatment resistance could point to cellular and regenerative therapies that work beyond inflammation. Separately, developing the bacterial lectin Cbeg5 could yield a new live biotherapeutic, a treatment made from living microbes, for inflammatory bowel disease.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Joseph Lee
University of Colorado Denver/Anschutz Medical Campus, CO·Microbiology & Immunology·Early-career
Test whether the microbial purine hypoxanthine shapes the energy metabolism of gut lining cells by turning on TIGAR, a protein that reroutes sugar metabolism, and AMPK, a master energy sensor.
Pawel Kiela
University of Arizona, AZ·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine whether loss of NAD+ or excess PARylation by the enzyme PARP1 is the main driver of experimental colitis, using PARP1 knockout mice and drug inhibition.
Nita Salzman
Medical College of Wisconsin, WI·Microbiology & Immunology
Identify which intestinal cells, including enterocytes, Paneth cells and fibroblasts, produce complement component 3 (C3) in the distal small intestine of mice colonized with the commensal bacterium Enterococcus faecalis.
The school
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai: 45 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 62 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.