Research Interests
The fundamental goal of the Salinas lab is to disentangle the complexity of molecular and cellular interactions that drive an immune response and how these contribute to autoimmunity of the central nervous system in diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis (MS). We apply methods from synthetic biology, high-throughput single-cell nucleic acid profiling, and massively parallel genetic engineering using pre-clinical animal models and patient-derived samples. These efforts are intricately motivated by their translational potential toward the treatment of patients with MS and other neuroimmunological disorders
Meet the team
Principal Investigator
Victor Salinas, M.D., Ph.D.Victor is an Instructor in the Department of Neurology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UTSW) and the Neurology Section at the North Texas VA Medical Center. Born in Ambato, Ecuador and raised in Toronto, Canada, Victor obtained his undergraduate degree at Harvard University where he worked in Arlene Sharpe's lab investigating the role of co-stimulatory molecules in regulatory T cell development and function. He subsequently moved to Dallas for his MD/PhD studies and completed his graduate work in the lab of Rama Ranganathan applying high-throughput mutagenesis and statistical genomics toward understanding how function is encoded in the amino acid sequences of proteins. He completed his residency training in Neurology at UTSW in 2022 during which he conducted research in Olaf Stüve's lab dissecting the contribution of myeloid cells to inflammation of the central nervous system.
Victor is also an attending Neurologist at the North Texas VA Medical Center where he evaluates and treats patients with neuroimmunological disorders.
Publications
Francisco, L., Salinas, V., Brown, K., Vanguri, V., Freeman, G., and Sharpe, A. PD-L1 regulates the development, maintenance, and function of induced regulatory T cells. (2009) J Exp Med 206(13): 3015-3029. PMID: 20008522
Nguyen, L., Johnson, T., Vengurlenkar, A., Zhang, R., White, K., and Salinas, V. (2014, March) Model-based design and analysis of a reconfigurable continuous-culture bioreactor. Paper presented at the Fourth Workshop on Design, Modeling, and Evaluation of Cyber Physical Systems (CyPhy’14), Berlin, Germany.
Stiffler, M., Subramanian, S., Salinas, V., and Ranganathan, R. A protocol for functional assessment of whole-protein saturation mutagenesis libraries utilizing high-throughput sequencing. (2016) J Vis Exp 113. PMID: 27403811
Salinas, V. and Ranganathan, R. Coevolution-based inference of amino acid interactions underlying protein function. (2018) Elife 7:e34300. PMID: 30024376
Salinas, V.*, Khan, T.*, Lorenzo, J., and Wang, C. Two pediatric cases of anti-Myelin Oligodendrocyte Glycoprotein (MOG) antibody disease with atypical presentation of acute flaccid paralysis. (2022) Neuroimmunology Reports 2: 100070. (*co-first authors)
Manouchehri, N.*, Salinas, V.*, Hussain, R., and Stuve, O. Distinctive transcriptomic and epigenomic signatures of bone marrow-derived myeloid cells and microglia in CNS autoimmunity. (2022) PNAS. Accepted (*co-first authors)
Contact Us
Email
Phone Number: 214-648-7244
Fax Number: 214-645-6239
Department of Neurology
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
6000 Harry Hines Blvd.
Dallas, TX 75390-8813 U.S.A