Daniel Kaplan, M.D., Ph.D. left the University of Minnesota and CFI in 2015. Graduate Students and Post Doctoral Fellows in the lab worked on understanding Dendritic cells (DC) which are professional antigen presenting cells found in skin, other peripheral tissues and in secondary lymphoid organs that are uniquely efficient at initiating T cell responses. The DC paradigm holds that tissue DC migrate to regional LN where they present antigen acquired in the periphery to T cells resulting in either a productive adaptive response or tolerance depending on the activation state of the DC. In the skin at steady-state there are at least 3 well-defined distinct subsets of DC that can be distinguished based on location, ontogeny and expression specific markers: Langerhans cells (LC), CD103+ dermal DC (dDC) and CD11b+ dDC. Why there are so many DC subsets and the contribution each one makes to the development of cutaneous adaptive immune responses is a primary focus of the lab.
Daniel Kaplan, MD, PhD, is a Professor at the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Dermatology.
Dr. Kaplan's clinical focus is general dermatology; an overview of his research can be found here.
