The focus of the Kwon lab is the application of new technologies to the study of immune responses against HIV at mucosal surfaces.

Mucosal surfaces represent both the primary site of HIV transmission and the largest reservoir of viral replication. Despite this, the immune response to HIV has largely been studied in the peripheral blood, which contains just 2-3% of all lymphocytes- a small minority relative to the 60-90% of the body’s T and B cells that reside at mucosal sites. One of the greatest barriers to a more detailed understanding of these responses is the inherently small amount of material that can be obtained from mucosal sampling. We are therefore employing new technologies, developed in conjunction with our collaborators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to simultaneously capture multiple measures of HIV-specific immune responses using small numbers of cells. Using these methodologies we have begun to map mucosal immune responses in gut associated lymphoid tissue (GALT) and the female reproductive tract at a level of resolution that has not been possible employing standard assays. This work is being performed using the large, well characterized patient cohorts available at the Ragon Institute to better understand resistance to HIV acquisition and spontaneous control of chronic HIV infection.

Dr. Douglas Kwon is a physician scientist at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard with a clinical practice in the division of Infectious Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He received his M.D. Ph.D. degrees from New York University and then underwent Internal Medicine training at the University of California, San Francisco and New York Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. He then completed his training in the combined Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital Infectious Disease fellowship program.