The O'Sullivan lab takes a interdisciplinary cyclical translation approach to discover new therapeutics that unleash the power of the innate immune system. Starting with clinical datasets, we model cell-cell interactions and gene regulatory networks to understand the critical mechanisms that activate or suppress the innate immune system during cancer, obesity, viral infection, and tissue injury. We then model these mechanisms using clinically relevant mouse models to discover conserved pathways that can be either drugged or engineered to enhance immune function. To this end, we have pioneered several CRISPR editing methods in primary innate immune cells to discover new gene targets and model patient-specific mutations. We have focused on 3 major research areas: