Cammie Lesser

Dr. Lesser is a board-certified infectious disease specialist in Boston, Massachusetts. She is currently licensed to practice medicine in Massachusetts. She is an Associate Professor of Medicine (Microbiology and Molecular Genetics) at Massachusetts General Hospital.

The Lesser lab is interested in understanding how bacterial pathogens manipulate host cell processes to promote their own survival and replication during the course of an infection. In particular, their efforts focus on determining how bacterial factors injected via type 3 protein delivery systems into the host cell cytosol act to disarm host innate immune responses, including the induction of pro-inflammatory cytokine production, pyroptosis, and autophagy. Their studies focus on virulence factors from Gram-negative enteric pathogens that cause gastrointestinal diseases including Shigella, Salmonella, Yersinia, and enteropathogenic E. coli. They have developed multiple innovative technologies to address these questions including an innovative bottom-up approach to study single, potentially functionally redundant effectors as well as yeast functional genomic and proteomic approaches to identify conserved eukaryotic signaling pathways targeted by the virulence proteins.