Rafael Polidoro, MSC, PhD

Rafael B Polidoro, Ph.D, is an Assistant Research Professor of Pediatrics infectious diseases at the Indiana University School of Medicine in the Ryan White Center for Pediatric Infectious Diseases and Global Health. He completed his Bachelor, Masters and PhD from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil, studying live-attenuated viral vector vaccines against T. cruzi and T. gondii, and one visiting PhD year at Harvard School of Public Health. He has done postdoctoral training on the role of gamma-9 delta-2 T cells in recognizing and killing Plasmodium falciparum infected red blood cells at Harvard Medical School/Boston Children’s Hospital; using CRISPR-Cas9 in primary human NK and CD4 T cells to study the roles of APOBEC and stress granules in innate lymphocytes at Harvard Medical School/Brigham and Women’s hospital; and in the role of gut microbiome on the impairment of systemic immunity against Plasmodium yoelii in mouse model.

Dr. Polidoro is interested in how the gut microbiome modulates the local and systemic immunology during infections. Particularly, how shifts in gut microbiome homeostasis can result in “immunological distraction” and its impacts in how the systemic immunity is then mounted. This work can have important consequences regarding vaccination, treatments, and major understanding of different immune responses in similar settings, where the major variable might be the gut microbiome.

For a full list of Dr. Polidoro’s publication, view the following page.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/1RgY1_wLqKSQp/bibliography/public/

Caroline Junqueira*, Rafael Polidoro*, Guilherme Castro, Sabrina Absalon, Zhitao Liang, Sumit Sen Santara, Ângela Crespo, Dhelio Pereira, Jeffrey Dvorin and Judy Lieberman. Vγ9Vδ2 T cells suppress Plasmodium falciparum blood stage infection by direct killing and phagocytosis. Nat Immunol Jan. 2021. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41590-020-00847-4. *co-authorship

Morgan Waide, Rafael Polidoro, Whitney L. Powell, Joshua E. Denny, Justin Kos, David A. Tieri, Corey T. Watson, Nathan W. Schmidt. Gut microbiota composition modulates the magnitude and quality of germinal centers during Plasmodium infections. 
Cell Reports, 33, 11 Dec. 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2020.108503

Rafael B. Polidoro, Robert S. Hagan, Roberta de Santis Santiago, Nathan Schmidt. Overview: Systemic inflammatory response derived from lung injury caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection explains severe outcomes in COVID-19. Front. Immunol. 11:1626 v Jun. 2020. https://doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2020.01626.

Maria Gutierrez-Arcelus, Nikola Teslovich, Alex Mola, Rafael Polidoro, Aparna Nathan, Hyun Kim, Susan Hannes, Kamil Slowikowski, Gerald Watts, Ilya Korsunsky, Michael Brenner, Soumya Raychaudhuri, and Patrick Brennan. Lymphocyte innateness is defined by underlying transcriptional states reflecting a balance between proliferation and effector functions. Nature Comms, Feb. 2019. doi10.1038/s41467-019-08604-4

Caroline Junqueira, Camila R. R. Barbosa, Pedro A. C. Costa, Andréa Teixeira-Carvalho, Guilherme Castro, Sumit Sen Santara, Rafael P. Barbosa, Farokh Dotiwala, Dhelio B. Pereira, Lis R. Antonelli, Judy Lieberman & Ricardo T. Gazzinelli. Cytotoxic CD8+ T cells recognize and kill Plasmodium vivax–infected reticulocytes. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-018-0117-4. Nature Medicine, 24 (1330–1336), 2018.