Welcome to the Pallesen Lab at Indiana University Bloomington

Immunobiology and Disease Biology

We are broadly interested in mechanisms by which the human immune system efficiently clears a pathogen from our bodies. We are of course equally interested in mechanisms by which a pathogen successfully evades this devastating response. Many signals determining the specific type of instigated immune response are communicated by biomolecular complex formation. We are interested in understanding such mechanisms in much more detail.

Despite the profound positive effects on human health prompted by vaccines, only ~80 vaccines that target a mere 24 pathogens have been FDA approved for use in the US. Many of these vaccines rely on decade-old technologies (e.g. attenuated virus particles). The detailed understanding provided by our research will significantly impact development of next-generation vaccine technologies. We focus our efforts in structural virology, structural immunology and structural vaccinology and our studies center around cryo-EM structure determination.