Name Akiko Iwasaki | ||
Institutions Yale University, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Books Cytotoxic T Lymphocyte Induction by Plasmid DNA Immunization [microform] : Mechanism and Applications Education University of Toronto, National Institutes of Health Fields Immunology, Molecular biology, Cell biology, Developmental Biology Institution Yale University, Howard Hughes Medical Institute | ||
Managing Relationships With Viruses - Professor Akiko Iwasaki
Akiko Iwasaki (born in 1970) is a Professor of Department of Immunobiology and Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University. She is also a Medical Investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Akiko was born and raised in Iga, Japan. After High School she moved to Toronto, Canada where she attended the University of Toronto. She had hopes of becoming a mathematician or physicist like her father. However, her interests changed after taking an immunology class. Currently, her research interests include innate immunity, autophagy, inflammasomes, sexually transmitted infections, herpes simplex virus, human papillomavirus, respiratory virus infections, influenza infection, T cell immunity, and commensal bacteria.
Contents
- Managing Relationships With Viruses Professor Akiko Iwasaki
- Career
- Major contributions
- Honors
- Publications
- References
Career
In 1994, Iwasaki received her bachelor's degree in biochemistry and physics from the University of Toronto. She also got her doctoral degree in immunology from the University of Toronto in 1998. She then pursued a PhD project probing how vaccines made from bits of DNA elicit an immune response. Iwasaki did her Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Institutes of Health. In 2000, she started her own lab at Yale University.
Major contributions
While working on her PhD project, Iwasaki was among the first to show that antigen-presenting cells were in the blood, not muscle. She investigated how DNA vaccination elicit an immune response. At the time scientists thought muscle cells were essential for alerting the immune system of foreign proteins, or antigens, coded for by the vaccines because the DNA vaccines work best when injected into the muscle.
Iwasaki's research continues to focus on understanding innate immunity and how that information is used to produce protective adaptive immunity. Iwasaki and her team study immune responses to influenza in the lungs and herpes simplex virus in the genital tract. Overall, the goal is to design effective vaccines or microbiocides for the prevention of transmission of viral and bacterial pathogens.
According to Google Scholar, one of her publications, Toll-like receptor control of the adaptive immune response, has been cited over 3,298 times and was published in Nature Immunology in October 2004. In January 2015 one of Iwasaki's studies was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, another prestigious journal. The study, Temperature-dependent innate defense against the common cold virus limits viral replication at warm temperature in mouse airway cells, investigates the relationship between temperature and an immune response.
Honors
Ethel Donaghue Women's Health Program Investigator Award
Eli Lilly and Company Research Award
BD Biosciences Investigator Award
Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in Biomedical Sciences
Wyeth Lederle Young Investigator Award
Burroughs Wellcome Fund Investigator in Pathogenesis in Infectious Diseases