Welcome to the Translational Microbiome and Immune Tolerance Laboratory
Our lab is located at the University of Maryland School of Medicine within the Center for Advanced Microbiome Research and Innovation (CAMRI) and the Institute of Genome Sciences (IGS). We investigate how the gut microbiome shapes immune development and the risk of allergic diseases early in life, a period when diet, microbial colonization, and immune training intersect.
Our research addresses a frontier in allergy biology: how microbial protein metabolism, influenced by early-life diet such as breastfeeding or formula feeding, alters the gut microbiome’s functional capacity and contributes to immune tolerance or allergy risk. By integrating multi-omics microbiome analyses, immunology, gnotobiotic models, and advanced computational approaches, we aim to uncover microbial and metabolic pathways that predict allergy development and can be leveraged for prevention or treatment.
Importantly, our projects are closely tied to ongoing NIH-funded clinical trials and collaborative networks, including the Immune Tolerance Network (ITN) and Systems Biology of Early Atopy (SunBEAm) birth cohort, providing opportunities to connect mechanistic lab research with clincial human studies. For trainees and researchers, our lab offers hands-on experience designing in vitro and in vivo experiments, analyzing multi-omics datasets, and contributing to translational research with real-world clinical impact. We are committed to fostering a collaborative, inclusive, and intellectually stimulating environment where curiosity drives discovery.
Please check our recent publications and open positions.
New Publication:
Gut Microbial Metabolism and Peanut Oral Immunotherapy Outcomes
Our latest paper, “Gut microbial bile and amino acid metabolism associate with peanut oral immunotherapy failure,” was just published in Nature Communications. This study, conducted during Dr. Özçam’s postdoctoral training, used integrated multi-omics analyses to reveal how gut microbial metabolism of bile acids and amino acids may influence the success or failure of peanut oral immunotherapy (POIT) in children. These findings not only highlight the role of the gut microbiome in food allergy treatment outcomes but also lay the groundwork for the Translational Microbiome and Immune Tolerance Laboratory's future research on microbiome-driven mechanisms of immune tolerance and allergy prevention.