Christopher K Glass MD PhD

Christopher K. Glass is Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine. His primary interests are to understand the mechanisms by which sequence-specific transcription factors, co-activators and co-repressors regulate the development and function of macrophages. A major direction of his laboratory has been to define the genome-wide locations and functions of these proteins through the use of assays that are based on massively parallel DNA sequencing. The combination of these technologies with molecular, genetic, lipidomic and cell-based approaches is providing striking new insights into mechanisms that regulate macrophage gene expression and function that are relevant to inflammatory diseases including diabetes, atherosclerosis and neurodegenerative diseases.

Dr. Glass’ laboratory investigates transcriptional mechanisms that regulate the development and function of the macrophage, a cell that plays key roles in immunity and inflammatory diseases. Current efforts are to determine the biochemical and biological roles of sequence-specific transcription factors and their associated co-regulators at gene-specific and genome-wide scales. A combination of biochemical, cellular and genetic model systems are used, incorporating macrophage-specific knockouts, microarray technologies, massively parallel sequencing and bioinformatics approaches, to unravel the contributions of specific factors to the development of specialized macrophage functions in immunity and the pathogenesis of inflammatory diseases.