Juan is interested in neuroimmune influences on sleep and circadian behaviour during chronic infections.

My name is Juan Quintana, and I am a group leader at the Lydia Becker Institute for Immunology and Inflammation, and the Geoffrey Jefferson Brain Research Centre. I am originally from Venezuela, where I undertook a bachelor’s degree in Cellular and Molecular Biology.

I then pursued a master’s degree in Biochemistry and cellular immunology at the University of Zaragoza in Spain, followed by a PhD in Immunity, Infection, and Evolution at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

What are your research interests?

A common thread of my research is my passion to understand how parasites can cause such a diverse range of pathologies. I’m particularly fascinated by how the brain copes with such challenges, and how this organ operates in the context of chronic, unresolved infections as it occurs in many viral infections such as Epstein Barr Virus and more recently COVID, but also in various neglected tropical diseases such as Human African trypanosomiasis or sleeping sickness. Indeed, my lab focuses on using African trypanosomes to study the neuroimmunology of sleep disorders, exemplifying that we can learn a lot of basic biology from studying parasitic infections. I find this absolutely fascinating!

What are your lab currently working on? Why is it important?

My team currently works on deciphering how B cells, traditionally regarded as cells that produce antibodies, can actually execute more diverse functions including maintaining an active dialogue with the brain through the production of various mediators, including anti-inflammatory cytokines and more recently, neurotransmitters (Quintana JF, et al. Nat comms, 2022; Quintana JF, et al. PLoS Biology, 2023).

Various preliminary studies show that mice deficient on these various pathways do not cope well with infections, and have abnormal sleep/wake patterns, but we don’t understand how this comes about. The premise of our current research is that brain-dwelling B cells maintain a healthy brain, and these cells become even more important when we experience challenges such as infections, ultimately modulating behaviour. We are currently exploring this in collaboration with partners in Oslo University, Stanford University and Manchester.

A second theme in the lab, led by the very talented Dr Matthew Sinton, is to explore how the brain communicates with the adipose tissue to control systemic metabolism and the quality of the immune response during infection. We have observed that a central pro-inflammatory cytokine called interleukin-17 (or IL-17 for short) can be sensed by brain areas controlling feeding behaviour, and that mice deficient for this cytokine do not lose weight, placing this cytokine at the core of the communication between these two organs (Quintana JF, et al. Nat comms, 2023; Sinton MC, et al. Nat comms, 2023).

Matthew is currently exploring these mechanisms in more details in collaboration with partners at the University of Manchester and Edinburgh, and Harvard University.

What’s coming up next for you and your lab?

This is an exciting time for the lab as we are preparing various grant applications and getting several projects off the ground. We have also received financial support from the Royal Society to build a behavioural room in our animal facility so we can conduct more refined behavioural tests in infected mice, from memory and anxiety to sleep and feeding.

Also, we have had several grant applications being successful, including a Springboard Award funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Academy of Medical Sciences to Juan, and a Wellcome Early Career Award to Matthew. So, there are a lot of things going on and we hope to be in a position to start generating the first manuscripts from the lab in the not-to-distant future.

We are also in the process of consolidating partnerships with collaborators in South Korea, Norway, and the US, with the ultimate goal to create a network of researchers interested in neuroimmunology of sleep and metabolic control during parasitic infections.

PhDs/postdocs who have worked in our lab in the past and what they’re doing now

We have been fortunate enough to work with extremely talented and motivated young scientists during our time in Glasgow.

For example, Praveena Chandrasegaran and Agatha Nabilla pursued master’s studies in the lab in Glasgow and are now excelling at very prestigious PhD programmes at the University of Edinburgh funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Similarly, we worked alongside Dr Bachar Cheaib who joined the team in Glasgow as a bioinformatician and is now a group leader at Heidelberg University in Germany.

These talented scientists provided invaluable inputs to our work in Glasgow and are the first lab alumni.

More about Juan

Read more about Juan’s research in Research Explorer.

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