PIPages
Labs

Gary Wu

University of Pennsylvania, PA·Microbiology & Immunology

The trillions of microbes living in and on the body, known as the microbiome, appear to play a key role in diseases of the digestive tract, liver and pancreas. Studying these diseases requires measuring both the microbes and the human or animal host, and then linking laboratory findings to patients.

Fields

Microbiology & Immunology

Medicine & Clinical Research

Genetics

Topics

microbiome

gut microbiota

host-microbial interactions

Grants
1 known grant, through May 2027

What they work on

  1. Provide analytic services to measure genomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics in both microbes and their mammalian hosts, including FACS, a method that sorts cells by fluorescent labels, and next-generation sequencing.
  2. Support microbiota research through expanded microbial culture facilities and broader metabolite measurement in partnership with the Penn Metabolomics core.
  3. Help investigators extend cell and animal model findings into human studies through a human biospecimen repository tracked with a LabVantage information system.
  4. Maintain annotated clinical data for characterizing inflammatory bowel disease in a REDCap database that researchers can mine with data science support.

More about the research

This grant supports a shared research core that provides those capabilities to investigators in Penn's Center for Molecular Studies in Digestive and Liver Diseases.

Why it matters

By linking measurements of gut microbes with host gene, protein and metabolite data and with annotated patient samples, this core could help researchers find biomarkers for precision medicine in digestive, liver and pancreatic diseases, including inflammatory bowel disease. It could also help them test whether changing the microbiome can prevent or treat these diseases.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

Host-Microbial Analytic and Repository Core (H-MARC)

NIH · Jul 1997 – May 2027

Closest labs

Jenessa Winston

Ohio State University, OH·Microbiology & Immunology·Early-career

Test whether daily supplementation with the secondary bile acid ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA) changes susceptibility to and severity of Clostridioides difficile infection in IL10-knockout colitis mice.

Larry Harshyne

Thomas Jefferson University, PA·Microbiology & Immunology

Provide high-quality, affordable analysis and sorting of cells, biological particles and extracellular vesicles using fluorescence-activated flow cytometers for cancer center researchers.

Zuhair Ballas

University of Iowa, IA·Medicine & Clinical Research

Provide cancer researchers with high-speed cell sorting, multi-parameter analysis and purification of specific cell subsets for basic and translational studies at the Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The school

University of Pennsylvania: 90 labs on PI Pages, $2.2B a year on research, 750 research doctorates a year.

More about University of Pennsylvania

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