Director, Division of Allergy and Immunology
Professor of Pediatrics
Pediatrics/ Division of Allergy and Immunology
Contact information: Marc [dot] Rothenberg [at] cchmc [dot] org

Research interests:

The Rothenberg laboratory is focused on elucidating the mechanisms of allergic responses especially in mucosal tissues such as the skin, lung and the gastrointestinal tract. With regard to bioterrorism, the Rothenberg lab is interested in determining how allergic diseases affect the risk to a bioterrorist agent or vaccine. The laboratory has identified and biologically characterized several critical pathways that regulate allergic responses. These discoveries include eosinophil effector mechanisms and the chemokine eotaxin/CCR-3 pathway. Current projects are (1) to elucidate the cellular and molecular processes involved in allergic responses using novel models of allergic responses in mice, (2) to test the importance of chemokines in vivo using chemokine transgenic and gene-targeted mice that the laboratory has developed, (3) to biochemically characterize the signal transduction mechanism responsible for eosinophil activation, (4) to test the importance and blockade of these pathways in patients with inflammatory diseases such as allergies, (5) to identify genes that predispose to allergies using DNA microarray genomic analysis, and (6) to identify the mechanism for smallpox vaccination hypersensitivity in patients with atopy (e.g. eczema).