Professor David G. Russell

Country: United States of America

Institution: Cornell University, Ithaca

Research Areas: Macrophage Biology, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, HIV-1 infection of macrophages

Lab Website: www.vet.cornell.edu/research/faculty/david-russell-phd

My lab is interested in how the infectious agents Mycobacterium tuberculosis and HIV-1 interact with their host macrophage populations.  With M. tuberculosis our interests range from the metabolic states of both the host cell and the bacterium, how this promotes disease progression, or controls bacterial expansion. And how macrophage ontogeny impacts this outcome.  We have targeted this interplay as a means of identifying new anti-microbial compounds that are either host-dependent or host-directed, and as such have developed complex drug screening platforms for interrogation of compound collections, which we conduct under BSL3 conditions at Cornell in collaboration with our pharmaceutical partners.

Our interest in HIV-1 focuses on the human lung.  We have developed new methods for detection of HIV-1 at single cell level and find that the virus exhibits high penetrance in the resident alveolar macrophage population in human volunteers in Malawi.  Intriguingly the virus promotes survival of HIV-1-infected macrophages and we believe that this supports viral persistence, even in the presence of ART.  We are examining the properties of both the virus and the host macrophage populations in the lung in collaboration with Dr. Henry Mwandumba, MLW, Blantyre.