Kate L. Jeffrey, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Medicine
Harvard Medical School
John Lawrence MGH Research Scholar 2020-2025
Associate member, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Faculty member, Harvard Immunology
Faculty member, Harvard Virology
Massachusetts General Hospital Boston, USA
ICIS member since 2015
Oral presentation selected from abstract, San Francisco 2016
Oral presentation selected from abstract, Kanazawa 2017 (declined due to pregnancy)
Oral presentation selected from abstract, Seattle/online 2020
Poster presentations from lab members: Seattle, Kanazawa, Boston, San Francisco
The central mission of the Jeffrey lab is to understand how the innate immune system is regulated, thereby enabling therapies that harness or hinder inflammation. My research focuses on the intersection of epigenetic and transcriptional control in macrophages and how dysregulation of these events can lead to immunological disease. I am passionate about translation of basic science, which I have been privileged to experience throughout my career. My postdoctoral work is the foundation of a new class of epigenetic inhibitors in clinical trials for treatment of inflammation and cancer.
My laboratory uses inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) as a model system to identify novel innate regulatory pathways. We demonstrated that human variants of the novel immune epigenetic ‘reader’, SP140, drives disease. More recently, we are examining the immunomodulatory capacity of the enteric virome, a new frontier for my research program. Both of these research programs are founded in human disease and samples, with applied murine models. I will continue studying human immune diseases using robust experimental systems. The long-term vision is that complex immune disorders can be curbed through disruption of the environment-epigenome axis.
Publications can be found here:
