The multi-disciplinary Program in Immunology consists of over 100 faculty who identify themselves as basic or clinical immunologists and are members of multiple units at UAB.
UAB is the home of several internationally prominent research programs, e.g., Developmental Immunology, Mucosal Immunology, Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology Division, Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Center, Host Defense, Virology and Vaccine Biology. Newer programs in Cancer Immunology, Allergy, Immunogenetics, Inflammation and Tissue Injury, Transplantation Immunology, Neuroimmunology, and Basic Immunology of the T cell and innate systems are poised to become highly competitive.
For a brief history of the Program in Immunology at UAB, written by Dr. Claude Bennett, please click here.
Tanecia Mitchell, Ph.D., Assistant Professor with the University of Alabama at Birmingham Department of Urology, has been awarded an $2.7 million R01 grant to investigate the role of dietary oxalate on immune function in kidney stone disease. 
In groundbreaking diabetes research over the past two decades, Anath Shalev, M.D., Nancy R. and Eugene C. Gwaltney Family Endowed Chair in Juvenile Diabetes Research, has shown that the protein TXNIP regulates survival and function of beta cells, the pancreatic cells that produce the hormone insulin to lower levels of glucose in the blood. In an article in the journal Endocrinology, Shalev and colleagues now report that downregulation of alpha cell TXNIP can inhibit alpha cell glucagon secretion, which in turn may help explain the improvement in hyperglucagonemia and hyperglycemia observed in diabetic aTKO mice. 
In a report published in Nature Communications, researchers led by Lewis Zhichang Shi, M.D., Ph.D., and UAB Department of Radiation Oncology Chair James A. Bonner, M.D., created a cleaner mouse melanoma model by knocking out the receptor gene for interferon-gamma signaling. They used this improved knockout model, called IFNγR1KO, to probe the mechanisms of immune checkpoint blockers (ICB) resistance. Their findings support the possibility that melanoma might be treatable by bypassing therapeutic resistance to ICBs. 
In collaborative studies, James J. Kobie, Ph.D., and Mark R. Walter, Ph.D., of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Luis Martinez-Sobrido, Ph.D., of the Texas Biomedical Research Institute, San Antonio, Texas, discovered a neutralizing monoclonal
antibody that potentially acts as a potent universal coronavirus therapy. 
For just the third time in history, a University of Alabama at Birmingham faculty member, Casey Weaver, MD from the Department of Pathology, has been elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences 
In a study published in the journal Science Immunology, Allan Zajac, Ph.D., and co-first authors Shannon M. Kahan, Ph.D., and Rakesh K. Bakshi, Ph.D., from the Department of Microbiology at UAB, show that two subsets of CD8 T cells develop to provide either short-term or long-term immune protection. The study focuses on one factor that guides this developmental bifurcation — interleukin-2 (IL-2). 
Casey D. Morrow, PhD and Hyunmin Koo, Ph.D. have refined a microbiome “fingerprint” method that tracks sub-strain variants of a single gut microbe strain. The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports. 
Beatriz León, Ph.D., and her UAB colleagues unraveled a complex trail for the antagonistic mechanisms of LPS to promote or prevent allergic disease through activation or suppression of T helper-2 immune cells. 