Christopher Hall Lab

Our group leverages off the genetic tractability and optical transparency of zebrafish to provide insights into immune responses that are relevant to human disease. These new biological insights have provided the foundation for chemical screens to identify novel drugs that may have utility in human disease. Using this strategy, we have progressed drugs discovered in the laboratory to clinical trials in less than 5 years. My early work, generating reporter lines to live image innate immune cells, helped pioneer the use of larval zebrafish to study immune cell biology during wound healing and infection. More recently, the research interests of my group have expanded to include metabolic and circadian regulation of immune cell function, the influence of infection on the blood stem cell compartment, and modelling diseases of sterile inflammation such as gout.