Research

Mission Statement

Our mission is to innovate leading-edge fundamental science and genetic engineering strategies to unlock the potential of B cells to protect against infection, cancer, and other diseases.

To realize this mission, we empower researchers by promoting research excellence in a collaborative environment with an emphasis on intellectual freedom, innovation, integrity, recognition, communication, and mentoring.

Areas of Research

Investigation of B cells specific for candidate vaccine antigens

B cells are best known for their ability to produce protective antibodies in response to infection or vaccination. Unfortunately, there are many deadly infections where researchers have not been able to make a vaccine able to induce B cells to produce protective antibodies. The Taylor lab aims to help the development of protective vaccines by using powerful techniques to analyze B cells with the potential to produce antibodies that would protect against infectious diseases such as AIDS, Malaria, and Syphilis.

Investigation of B cells specific for tumors

Over the past few years strong evidence has indicated that B cells may play a role in killing tumor cells. While this vibrant area of research is still in the early stages, the Taylor lab has begun using their powerful approaches to study B cells targeting tumor cells in a rare but deadly skin cancer called Merkel Cell Carcinoma. As Merkel Cell Carcinoma cases continue to rise worldwide, the Taylor lab aims to understand the protective response of B cells targeting this cancer so therapies can be developed to stop this cancer.

Engineering B cells to provide protection against infection

As an alternative approach to protect against infection, we have developed approaches where B cells are genetically engineered to produce protective antibodies. This approach could be helpful in situations where vaccination fail to induce protection, or vaccination does not work because the person does not have a fully-functional immune system. Our initial work has been promising, and current work is focused upon improving the protective capabilities of these “emAb” B cells as move this approach towards the clinic to help protect people from infection.

Understanding factors limiting B cell activation following vaccination

Protective vaccines rely on the ability of host B cells to recognize foreign antigen and respond, generating effector subsets that can produce antibody and neutralize invading pathogens. However, the critical first step in this process is that the naïve B cell must bind antigen and become activated. Surprisingly, we recently found that 60%-80% of naïve antigen-specific B cells fail to expand in response to vaccination. Current work is aimed at understanding the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that limit the activation of naïve B cells after vaccination. To investigate these questions, we probe the phenotypes and functions of rare antigen-specific human and murine B cells using our antigen-specific enrichment techniques. The goal of this work is to understand the factors that limit naïve B cell activation allowing for activation of all potentially protective naïve B cells after vaccination.

Understanding the differentiation of B cells following vaccination

Naïve B cell activation and proliferation is only the first step in a protective response. Activated B cells must also undergo a complicated process of differentiation in order to produce long-lived antibody-secreting plasma cells and long-lived memory B cells. In previous work we have assessed the number and phenotype of memory B cells generated through the germinal center-dependent and germinal center-independent pathways. Using an in vivo limited dilution approach we have found that a single antigen-specific naïve murine B cell usually does not produce progeny that differentiate down each developmental pathway. Current work is focused upon understanding the B cell intrinsic and extrinsic mechanisms that control differentiation. The ultimate goal of this work is to be able to direct B cell differentiation to ensure that B cells expressing potentially-protective antibodies enter the optimal differentiation pathway to produce long-lived protective progeny.