Jose Villadangos
Jose Villadangos is a Professor in the Departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and Microbiology and Immunology. His work straddles biochemistry, cell biology and immunology. He has contributed to elucidating the complexity of the dendritic cell network in vivo and the mechanisms by which immune cells capture, process and present antigens. His current research interests include:
- The mechanisms of antigen presentation in dendritic cells
- The regulation of proteostasis by membrane ubiquitin ligases
- The mechanisms controlling the dimerisation of the amyloidogenic protease inhibitor Cystatin C
- Autophagy
- The development of adoptive cell therapy for the treatment of cancer
Image of dendritic cells
Major research projects
The following is a list of research projects in the Villadangos lab. For more information please visit the Villadangos website at the Department of Microbiology and Immunology.
- Characterisation of antigen presentation pathways in dendritic cells
- Receptor mediated antigen trafficking in DCs
- Mechanism of impaired DC function caused by systemic inflammation or infection
- Autophagy: a novel pathway of protein degradation, antigen presentation and T cell immunity
- Characterization of OGlcNAc glycosylation in DCs
- Understanding the mechanisms that impair anti-tumour adoptive cell therapy
- Memory T cell responses in viral infections
- Targeting BST-2/tetherin to combat viral infection
- Expression and substrate recognition by MARCH ubiquitin ligases
- The amyloidogenic protease inhibitor Cystatin C in health and disease
Techniques
Molecular cell biology, immunology and biochemistry including: in vivo animal models, adoptive cell transfer, bone marrow reconstitution, mammalian cell culture, flow cytometry (FACS), cell sorting, T cell proliferation assays, viral transduction systems, siRNA and shRNA knock down, microscopy including confocal microscopy and super-resolution microscopy, PCR and cloning, real time PCR, SDS page, western blotting, immuno-precipitation, radiolabelling, microarrays and proteomics.
Bio - Jose Villadangos
Jose obtained his PhD from the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in 1994 under the supervision of Prof Jose A Lopez de Castro, studying the role of MHC polymorphism in peptide selection and T cell recognition. He then joined the laboratory of Prof Hidde Ploegh in the USA, first at MIT and later at Harvard Medical School, where he contributed to the identification of proteases involved in MHC class II antigen presentation. In 1998, he joined the laboratory of Prof Ken Shortman at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI) in Melbourne, Australia, to apply his expertise to the study of dendritic cells. He started his own laboratory at WEHI in 2001 and moved to The University of Melbourne in 2011.
As a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Jose applies his expertise in biochemistry, cell biology, proteomics, microscopy and immunology to his own research and to collaborations between the two departments.
Lab personnel
Head
Professor Jose Villadangos
Research staff
Justine Mintern (Postdoctoral Fellow)
Yuekang Xu (Postdoctoral Fellow)
Sandro Prato (Postdoctoral Fellow)
Nishma Gupta (Postdoctoral Fellow)
Javier Vega Ramos (Postdoctoral Fellow)
Simone Meuter (Postdoctoral Fellow)
Dr Linda Wakim (Postdoctoral Fellow
Wei Jin Chin (Research assistant)
Graduate students
Alan Ching
Jessica Moffat
Gabriela Segal
Natalie Patterson
The Villadangos Group