Biography

Dr. Alexey V. Fedulov has an M.D. in Internal Medicine and a Ph.D. in Immunology/Allergy and Pathophysiology from St. Petersburg Pavlov Medical University. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard School of Public Health and later became Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School / Brigham and Women's Hospital. His research has been awarded with a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award from NIH. He has developed a program of independently funded experimental studies, trained fellows and students and taught Pathophysiology of Human Disease course for Harvard students in the Public Health programs.

He joined Brown and the RIH community in 2018 to expand his studies in epigenetics.

Research Overview

Fedulov laboratory studies epigenetic regulation and develops molecular tools for epigenetic engineering.

Any cell in an organism includes all genes of that organism's genome. The difference in structure and function of cells results from epigenetic silencing of 'unnecessary genes' which occurs in great part by DNA methylation. Taking control of the epigenome is a novel and exciting biomedical challenge. Moreover, in disease the aberrant DNA methylation in key regulatory areas (e.g. promoters) can inhibit gene transcription. There is an increasing wealth of DNA methylation abnormalities in numerous pathologies, however we usually cannot say if these abnormalities are in fact causative for the disease. Another major challenge is that no effective approach currently exists to gene-specifically demethylate a target area, and little is known about DNA demethylation mechanisms.

We develop custom-designed molecules of putative DNA demethylases fused with sequence-specific DNA binding domains and use these tools to re-activate or enhance the silenced intrinsic genes in cells. The method will be broadly applicable as an experimental tool in epigenetics and may open avenues to a novel class of therapeutics.

Our models focus on inflammation, tissue repair and immune regulation with potential applications in lung disease (fibrosis, COPD, asthma) and in surgical research. We are especially pursuing epigenetic and microbiome alterations in asthma triggered by exposure to environmental toxicants like particulate matter.