Takeshi Egawa, MD, PhD

Washington University in St. Louis (WU)

The major theme of my laboratory is the study of lineage commitment programs during lymphocyte differentiation. Our laboratory is interested in understanding the regulatory mechanisms controlling the development of distinct lineages of T lymphocytes and how specific sets of genes are activated or repressed by transcription factors. Specifically, our current projects focus on two transcription factors, ThPOK and Runx3, which regulate development of helper vs cytotoxic lineage in the thymus from common precursors. In addition, we are also interested in silencing of helper lineage genes during cytotoxic lineage differentiation. We are trying to understand how epigenetic silencing is established in the context of cell differentiation using the Cd4 gene as a model.