About
Tom Lane has been working in evaluating mechanisms governing neuroinflammation in response to infection, injury, or autoimmune-induced neurologic disease. After completing his Ph.D. research in Microbiology and Immunology at the UCLA School of Medicine, he did his postdoctoral work in neurovirology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA. Dr. Lane joined the Biological Sciences faculty at UC Irvine in 1998 where he is now a Chancellor’s Professor of Neurobiology & Behavior. Dr. Lane has served as Director of the Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Research Center and Associate Director of the Institute for Immunology. Lane was awarded a National Multiple Sclerosis Society (NMSS) Collaborative Center Award as well as a California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) Early Translation Award dedicated to exploring the therapeutic potential of neural stem cells in treating human demyelinating diseases with a primary focus on MS.
Another area of ongoing work in the Lane laboratory is to define mechanisms associated with host defense and disease following infection of the central nervous system (CNS) with neuroadapted strains of murine coronaviruses (MuCoV) which induces an acute encephalomyelitis followed by a chronic immune-mediated demyelinating disease that has similar clinical and histologic disease to MS. More recently, Dr. Lane’s laboratory is exploring how infection of susceptible transgenic mice expressing the human angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (hACE2) which is the receptor for SARS-CoV-2 which is the causative agent for COVID-19. We are currently exploring mechanisms by which SARS-CoV-2 infection leads to neurologic disease by either directly infecting the CNS or through induction of an acute cytokine/chemokine storm. Furthermore, there is ongoing testing of anti-viral drugs that inhibit SARS-CoV-2 replication in vitro and in vivo.
Contact: tlane@uci.edu
Professor | Department of Neurobiology & Behavior | University of California, Irvine