Immune dysregulation is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in children, yet the mechanisms by which viral infections trigger aberrant immune responses remain poorly understood. The Bodansky Lab applies state-of-the-art functional genomic technologies to comprehensively profile autoantibody repertoires across health and disease. Our discovery of the "autoreactome" — the complete, distinct, longitudinally stable set of autoantibodies in each individual — has opened new avenues for understanding and treating autoimmune disease.
Research Pillars
Pillar 1: CHAMP — Building the Foundation for Discovery
The Child Health Advanced Molecular Phenotyping (CHAMP) program is a systematic biobanking and molecular phenotyping initiative at UCSF. CHAMP is IRB-approved to collect all human biofluids and tissues — including biopsy, surgical, and post-mortem specimens — from all organs and ages. The program standardizes biobanking across pediatric autoimmunity, inflammatory disease, critical illness, and enigmatic disease at UCSF.
Pillar 2: Decoding Immune Dysregulation with Next-Generation Technologies
The lab works at the intersection of next-generation technology development and translational immunology, building and deploying platforms that enable discoveries not possible with conventional methods.
PhIP-Seq — Phage Immunoprecipitation Sequencing. High-throughput proteome-wide autoantibody profiling using a T7 phage display library with 730,000+ clones tiling the entire human proteome.
PhASER — Phage-Assisted Scanning Epitope Recovery. High-resolution epitope mapping via alanine scanning, stop-codon scanning, and XTEN linker extension.
AEGIS — Autoimmune Epitope and immunoGlobulin/Immune-receptor identification System. An integrated platform connecting BCR/TCR repertoires at tissue injury sites to their cognate self-epitopes.
PAIRIS — Prediction of Antibody-antigen Interaction at high Resolution In Silico. Computational antibody-antigen modeling using AlphaFold3 and Rosetta-based structural prediction.
Pillar 3: Pioneering Targeted Immunomodulatory Therapies
Mechanistic insights from our research guide rational therapy selection for autoimmune disease. Our 2024 Journal of Clinical Investigation publication demonstrated the superiority of BCMA-targeted CAR-T cells for autoantibody removal by leveraging the autoreactome as an evaluation framework. We assess immunologic changes from emerging interventions and aim to develop personalized therapies that recalibrate specific pathogenic cells and pathways in individual children.
Active Collaborative Research Areas
- Post-viral immune dysregulation
- Long COVID / PASC
- Post-Ebola ocular disease
- Pediatric critical illness
- Paraneoplastic disease: ROHHAD — rare fatal pediatric neuroendocrine syndrome
- Autoimmune antigen discovery
- Idiopathic pulmonary artery hypertension
- T cell mediated pediatric acute liver failure (TC-PALF)
- Gestational alloimmune liver disease (GALD)
- Rasmussen's encephalitis
- Systemic capillary leak syndrome
- New onset refractory status epilepticus (NORSE)
- Pediatric critical care immunology
- Therapeutic evaluation (CAR-T cell effects on autoantibody repertoires)