Dr. Diane Bolton received her Ph.D. from the NIH-Johns Hopkins University cooperative graduate program in 2006. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship on mucosal vaccination against pathogens such as HIV and tuberculosis, with a focus on T cell immunity, with Dr. Mario Roederer at NIH’s Vaccine Research Center in Bethesda, MD.
Research
Dr. Bolton’s interests focus on immune responses to vaccination and mechanisms of viral persistence during HIV/SIV infection. Her team explores the adaptive immune responses to prophylactic and therapeutic vaccine regimens to elucidate cellular and humoral correlates of protection. Emphasis is placed on pre-clinical nonhuman primate animal models as well as clinical trials.
Persistence of HIV-1 reservoirs represents the primary barrier to curing HIV-1 infection. Cure strategies aiming to eliminate infected cell reservoirs are hampered by a poor understanding of host cells harboring virus in vivo, including biomarkers that definitively distinguish them. The Bolton Lab probes clinical and pre-clinical specimens for infected cells by state-of-the-art molecular analyses to address questions regarding: 1) infected cell burden across anatomical compartments and infection stages; and 2) novel host factors involved in viral replication and persistence. These studies inform preventative vaccines and therapeutic curative interventions.