Dr Eric Rubin
Adjunct Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases | Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases
Since the Circus closed, Dr Rubin has devoted full time to research and medicine. He is a tuberculosis researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, an infectious disease specialist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Editor-In-Chief at the New England Journal of Medicine.
Our
RESEARCH
Tuberculosis kills 1.5 million people every year. Despite over a century of research on the causative organism, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, we still have an incomplete understanding of tuberculous infections. The lab’s goal is to better understand the basic biology of this pathogen and how it causes disease, in order to develop new therapeutic strategies.
The lab’s research focuses primarily on three areas. The study of the fundamental cell biology of the organism, including central processes such as cell wall metabolism, cell growth and translation. We also investigate antibiotics – how they work and how they can make new ones. Finally, we build the tools to study mycobacteria both in vitro and during infection. We are also interested in the related non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM). Infections from NTMs are on the rise and notoriously difficult to treat. We are pursuing new tools to study the unique biology of NTMs in hopes of discovering new therapeutic approaches.
As a member of the TBSGC, within the Chemigenomics Core the Rubin Lab has developed a method for high-throughput imaging of a library of fluorescently tagged proteins expressed in mycobacteria. We also develop and employ a variety of genetic approaches, including generation of mycobacterial mutant strains (including under- and over-expression of targeted proteins) for biological studies and structure-function studies, tagged strains for localization studies, and resistance-associated mutant strains for inhibitor studies. As a part of Protein Homeostasis project, the Rubin Lab conducts studies to characterize the functions of key proteins that mediate and modulate translation in Mtb.