2018 Emerging Leader Award Recipient ($100,000 grant), Michal Caspi Tal, PhD
Principal Scientist, MIT Department of Biological Engineering & Associate Scientific Director, MIT Center for Gynepathology Research
Dr. Michal “Mikki” Tal did her postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Irving Weissman at Stanford, where she later became an instructor at the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Stanford University, leading the infectious disease team and studying immunomodulatory mechanisms which impact immune clearance of infectious disease, with a focus on Lyme disease. She is interested in the mechanisms of immune regulation that rein in the immune response and can be targeted to enable clearance of chronic infection. Her project, detailed below, was selected for the 2018 Emerging Leader Award, a $100,000 grant.
Project Overview
Recent advances in oncology research have found that a protein called CD47 prevents immune cells from engulfing and killing certain cancer cells. Dr. Tal’s ELA project explores if B. burgdorferi has a CD47 mimic and, if so, will determine the structure and sequence of that protein. She will examine how the CD47 mimic binds to a receptor on the immune cell and also screen compounds that may be able to block this interaction so that immune cells once again can engulf B. burgdorferi and eliminate it.