Dusan Bogunovic, PhD

Dusan is a Professor in the Precision Immunology Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine and Director of the Center for Inborn Errors of Immunity. His lab focuses on the study of human immunogenetics, aiming to improve understanding of the human immune system by studying 1) individuals with rare auto-inflammatory syndromes, 2) individuals with severe clinical presentations of infections usually causing mild or no clinical disease, and 3) individuals with Down Syndrome. To dissect these phenotypes, he uses genomic, genetic, molecular biology, cellular biology, immunology, and clinical tools.  During this research, he discovered that individuals with defective negative regulatory circuits of the type I interferon innate immune signaling pathway, specifically mutations in the ISG15-USP18 axis, are highly resistant to viral infections. This discovery and the development of methods to reproduce this phenotype in an otherwise normal genetic background inspired the formation of Lab11 Therapeutics.