Professor of Child Health and Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, School of Medicine
NextGen Focus Area: Cancer and Immunology (Treatment, Prevention and Transplantation)
Esma Yolcu has a significant interest in using hematopoietic stem cells for the treatment of bone marrow failure syndrome and hematological malignancies and as a means of immunomodulation to prevent/treat Type 1 diabetes and allograft rejection. Imperative to these efforts is the development of novel proprietary platform technology ProtEx™ that allows the generation of novel immune ligands with robust immune stimulatory or suppressive functions; and the temporary display of these ligands, either individually or in combination, on biological and nonbiological surfaces for localized immunomodulation.
Precision Health Impact:
- Learning how to treat autoimmune diseases, including Type 1 diabetes
- Investigating use of hematopoietic stem cells for immunomodulation
Publications:
- Shrestha P, Turan A, Batra L, Gulen AE, Sun Z, Tan H, et al. Engineering donor lymphocytes with Fas ligand protein effectively prevents acute graft-versus-host disease. Blood Adv. 2023 May 23;7(10):2181–95.
- Lei J, Coronel MM, Yolcu ES, Deng H, Grimany-Nuno O, Hunckler MD, et al. FasL microgels induce immune acceptance of islet allografts in nonhuman primates. Sci Adv. 2022 May 13;8(19):eabm9881.
- Batra L, Shrestha P, Zhao H, Woodward KB, Togay A, Tan M, et al. Localized Immunomodulation with PD-L1 Results in Sustained Survival and Function of Allogeneic Islets without Chronic Immunosuppression. J Immunol. 2020 May 15;204(10):2840–51.
- Woodward KB, Zhao H, Shrestha P, Batra L, Tan M, Grimany-Nuno O, et al. Pancreatic islets engineered with a FasL protein induce systemic tolerance at the induction phase that evolves into long-term graft-localized immune privilege. Am J Transplant. 2020 May;20(5):1285–95.
- Yerneni SS, Lathwal S, Shrestha P, Shirwan H, Matyjaszewski K, Weiss L, et al. Rapid On-Demand Extracellular Vesicle Augmentation with Versatile Oligonucleotide Tethers. ACS Nano. 2019 Sep 24;13(9):10555–65.
Google Scholar
PubMed
ResearchGate
Email: esma.yolcu@health.missouri.edu
Department website: https://www.medicine.missouri.edu/faculty/esma-yolcu-phd