Title: Professor of Pathology, Professor of Microbiology
Contact: Kenneth Tung, M.D. kst7k@Virginia.EDU

Laboratory interests:
Factors responsible for immunological self tolerance and autoimmune disease development. Focus is on 1) regulatory T cell response to endogenous self antigens, and 2) mechanism of autoimmune inflammation.

Research projects:

1. Ontogeny and accessibility of self Ag in tolerance induction.
2. Mechanism of immune privilege.
3. Antigen specific natural regulatory T cells as mechanism of tolerance.
4. Epitope spreading in autoimmune disease.
   
   

What you will learn from this rotation:

1. Adult and neonatal experimental autoimmune diseases.
2. Mouse immunogenetics
3. Autoantibody detection.
4. Antigen specific T cell detection and functional analysis.
5. Isolation of leukocyte subsets.
6. Flow cytometric analysis of leukocytes.
7. Immunohistology.
8. Mouse surgery.
9. Transgenic models of autoimmunity.
   
   

Principles:

• Imbalance of regulatory and effector T cell function determines autoimmune disease pathogenesis.
• Endogenous antigens are critical in regulating tolerance and autoimmunity.
• Propensity of neonatal mice to autoimmune response and disease.
• Early immunological events prime individuals for late onset autoimmunity.
• Factors that obscure the detection of target autoantigen and disease mechanism.