The Bodansky Lab at the University of California, San Francisco investigates the immunologic determinants of pediatric disease. The fundamental question we seek to answer: Why are some children uniquely vulnerable to critical illness? We pursue this question across three interconnected areas.
First, we study how adaptive immune responses — particularly epitope-resolved antiviral antibodies and autoantibodies — shape vulnerability and resilience to infection. Second, we work to identify the specific pathogenic B and T cells driving currently unexplained diseases, and to determine the precise antigens and epitopes they target. Third, we investigate the autoreactome: the longitudinally stable, individual-specific repertoire of autoantibodies present in every person. We seek to understand how the autoreactome is established, how infections reshape it, and how it can be leveraged for predictive immunology and mechanistic disease discovery.
To pursue these questions, we apply high-throughput platforms for proteome-wide immunological profiling, working in close collaboration with the DeRisi, Anderson, and Wilson Labs at UCSF. Our ultimate goal is to build the mechanistic foundation needed to design precision therapies for critically ill children.
Research Highlights
Drivers of autoimmunity: molecular mimicry and paraneoplastic disease. We have identified mechanistic links between infections or cancers and the subsequent development of autoimmune disease, including identifying molecular mimicry as a driver of MIS-C and uncovering the autoreactive B and T cells within the CNS that underlie the paraneoplastic disease ROHHAD. Learn more →
CHAMP. Building a first-of-its-kind pediatric biorepository that systematically collects and molecularly phenotypes biospecimens across disease states, organs, and ages — creating the infrastructure needed to understand immune development and distinguish health from disease at scale. Learn more →
Decoding immune dysregulation. Developing and deploying next-generation technologies — PhIP-Seq, PhASER, AEGIS — to map autoantibody and lymphocyte repertoires at proteome-wide scale and residue-level resolution. Through this work we helped define and map the autoreactome. Learn more →
Targeted therapies. Translating mechanistic discoveries into rational therapy design, including evaluation of CAR-T cells and emerging immunomodulatory approaches for autoimmune disease. Learn more →
Support
Research in the Bodansky Lab is supported by the National Institutes of Health (K08AI187711), the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award for Medical Scientists, the NIH RECOVER Program, and the UCSF Pediatric Scientist Scholars Program (PSSP).