Dr. Andrew Luster directs new Asthma and Allergic Diseases
Cooperative Research Center
In August 2011, Dr. Andrew Luster was awarded an NIH-funded Asthma and Allergic Diseases
Cooperative Research Center (AADCRC) grant.
The AADCRC program remains the cornerstone of the NIAID’s efforts to promote
multidisciplinary basic and clinical research on the immunological basis, pathobiology,
diagnosis, treatment and prevention of asthma and allergic diseases.
The goal of the MGH/HMS AADCRC is to understand the balance of effector and regulatory
allergen-specific T cell activity that determines clinical disease in asthma and food allergy and to
establish the utility of using tolerogenic dendritic cells to manipulate this balance to induce
allergen-specific tolerance. This would pave the way for new therapeutic approaches to treat
these and other allergic diseases.
The following is a brief description of the AADCRC’s three projects and four cores:
Project 1 focuses on the role of antigen-specific effector and regulatory T cells in determining
airway inflammation and airway hyper-reactivity by correlating the numbers, phenotype and
function of these cells in allergic asthmatics and allergic non-asthmatics using innovative
imaging techniques; Project 2 focuses on correlating the numbers, phenotype and function of
these same T cell subsets with clinical outcomes of milk allergic patients undergoing milk oral
immunotherapy; and Project 3 focuses on the ability of tolerogenic dendritic cell therapy to
manipulate the balance between these two opposing T cell populations in favor of regulatory T
cells and tolerance in both asthma and food allergy. The three interrelated projects are
supported by cores that recruit, enroll and characterize allergic subsets for segmental allergen
challenge and oral immunotherapy, provide MHC class II tetramers to specifically identify and
study allergen-specific T cells, and perform sophisticated transcriptome phenotypic analysis on
T cell and dendritic cell subsets.