Jason Edward Shoemaker
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Microbiology & Immunology
Men and women often get sick in different ways from the flu, and sex hormones are one reason. Hormones can change how the body's first-line immune defenses respond to infection.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Biomedical Engineering
Computer Science
- Topics
influenza
estradiol
estrogen
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2029
What they work on
- Identify lung immune responses that estradiol controls in male and female influenza-infected mice, using time-course immune and transcriptomic data and dynamic mathematical models of immune mechanisms.
- Find the top gene regulators through which estradiol alters infection of human respiratory epithelial cells and lung macrophages from male and female donors, using viral load, phospho-signaling, gene expression and network perturbation analysis.
- Validate the highest-ranked estradiol-regulated pathways and regulators in cultured human cells to confirm their activity during influenza infection.
- Determine how monocytes contribute to sex-specific, estradiol-regulated flu responses, using immune cell depletion, knockout mice and dynamic modeling to test whether candidate regulators change disease severity.
More about the research
They can also change how well the virus copies itself in human airway cells, and they do so differently in males and females. What is still missing is a clear, step-by-step picture of how hormone levels and biological sex connect to immunity, virus growth and how sick a person gets.
Why it matters
Flu outcomes differ between men and women, yet treatment rarely accounts for sex or hormone levels. By pinpointing host factors and estradiol-controlled pathways that drive lung inflammation and virus growth, this work could reveal new drug targets. It could also support influenza treatments tailored to a patient's sex or circulating hormone levels.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Amali Samarasinghe
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine how eosinophils, allergy-associated white blood cells, take up and kill Streptococcus pneumoniae inside and outside the cell, and how taking up the bacteria changes the eosinophils' physiology and features.
Anny Zhou
University of Virginia, VA·Microbiology & Immunology
Dissect the molecular mechanism by which GSDMB, an asthma-linked gene on chromosome 17q21, promotes interferon signaling and the expression of interferon-stimulated genes in human airway epithelial cells treated with RNA viruses or the viral RNA mimic poly(I:C).
Berenice Benayoun
University of Southern California, CA·Genetics
Characterize overall aging trajectories, including frailty, in two new mouse models of menopause: mid-life exposure to VCD, a chemical that depletes ovarian follicles, and Foxl2 haploinsufficiency (one working copy of an ovary-maintaining gene).
The school
University of Pittsburgh: 83 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 403 research doctorates a year.
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