TMitchell Lab

About 

All immunologists study one aspect or another of the immune system’s mandate: to protect self without destroying self. The immune system is powerfully protective, such as when it kills cancer cells before they can grow into tumors, or blocks pathogens from infecting us. On the other hand, healthy tissue that is erroneously attacked by the immune system leads to disease, such as development of Type I diabetes following destruction of healthy pancreatic islet cells. The TMitchell Lab has studied various manifestations of self/non-self immune responses over the years including: mechanisms of peripheral deletion verus T cell survival after activation in inflammatory environments, deciphering how next generaton vaccine adjuvants can boost immunity without causing harm, and devising new approaches to engineer vaccine antigens and additives for immune protection from infectious disease.

Key Research Areas

• Sex differences in protective immune antibody responses
• Vaccine formulations to maximize immunization efficiency using a plague model
• Transcriptomics of human lymphocytes using long-read sequencing technology

Team 

• Thomas C. Mitchell, Ph.D.

Recent Publications

• Mitchell TC and Casella CR. No pain no gain? Adjuvant effects of alum and monophosphoryl lipid A in pertussis and HPV vaccines. Current Opinion in Immunology 2017, 47:17–25. PubMed ID: 28728074.
• SenGupta S, Rane MJ, Uriarte SM, Woolley C, & Mitchell TC. Human neutrophils depend on extrinsic factors produced by monocytes for their survival response to TLR4 stimulation. Innate Immunity. 2019 Nov; 25(8). PubMed ID: 31480890.
• Wang YQ, Bazin-Lee H, Evans JT, Casella CR, Mitchell TC. MPL Adjuvant Contains Competitive Antagonists of Human TLR4. Front Immunol. 2020;11:577823. PubMed ID: 33178204.
• Woolley CR, Chariker JH, Rouchka EC, Ford EE, Elizabeth A Hudson EA, Sabine J Waigel SJ, Melissa L Smith ML, and Mitchell TC. Reference long-read isoform-aware transcriptomes of 4 human peripheral blood lymphocyte subsets. G3 (Bethesda). 2022 Nov 4;12(11):jkac253. doi:10.1093/g3journal/jkac253. PubMed ID: 36161486.
• J Immunol. 2023 May 15;210(10):1607-1619. FLAIRR-Seq: A Method for Single-Molecule Resolution of Near Full-Length Antibody H Chain Repertoires. Ford EE, Tieri D, Rodriguez OL, Francoeur NJ, Soto J, Kos JT, Peres A, Gibson WS, Silver CA, Deikus G, Hudson E, Woolley CR, Beckmann N, Charney A, Mitchell TC, Yaari G, Robert P Sebra RP, Watson CT and Smith ML. PubMed ID: 37027017.