Debbie Yablonski, PhD, Professor

Deborah Yablonski is a preclinical faculty member at the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, where she heads the Immune Cell Signaling Lab and teaches immunology.

At the Immune Cell Signaling Lab, we seek to decipher the intracellular regulatory mechanisms that precisely control immune responses, specifically in T cells and mast cells. Our work focuses on adaptor proteins, as regulators and organizers of signal transduction cascades.

As part of this work, we identified a regulatory junction at which dimerization of an adaptor protein known as Gads is specifically required for T cell and mast cell-mediated immune responses. In part of our research program, we seek to leverage this knowledge, by developing Gads dimerization inhibitors as a new approach to immune modulation.

In other research, we are characterizing unique mouse models that will reveal the regulatory roles of Gads in modulating T cell development and T cell-mediated mediated immune responses. Our research may suggest improved ways to harness T cells for cancer therapy. In one such project, we shall use our unique mouse model to study how CAR T cell therapy may be optimized, by attenuating the strength of signaling through the TCR signaling pathway.