Paul James Albert

Weill Cornell Medicine | Cornell

Background: The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds academic institutions for training doctoral (PhD) students and postdoctoral fellows. These training grants, known as T32 grants, require schools to create, in a particular format, seven or eight Word documents describing the program and its participants. Weill Cornell Medicine aimed to u...

Microbes capable of persisting inside nucleated cells can significantly alter human metabolism by changing the expression of human genes. An increasing number of studies show that the human microbiome shifts away from homeostasis in patients with chronic inflammatory conditions. Several key pathogens previously tied to inflammatory disease persist...

The human body is a superorganism in which thousands of microbial genomes continually interact with the human genome. A range of physical and neurological inflammatory diseases are now associated with shifts in microbiome composition. Seemingly disparate inflammatory conditions may arise from similar disruption of microbiome homeostasis. Intracellu...

Publications are a key data source for investigator profiles and research networking systems. We developed ReCiter, an algorithm that automatically extracts bibliographies from PubMed using institutional information about the target investigators. ReCiter executes a broad query against PubMed, groups the results into clusters that appear to constit...

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS)/myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) has long been associated with the presence of infectious agents, but no single pathogen has been reliably identified in all patients with the disease. Recent studies using metagenomic techniques have demonstrated the presence of thousands of microbes in the human body that were previousl...

Purpose of review: To demonstrate how dysbiosis of the human microbiome can drive autoimmune disease. Recent findings: Humans are superorganisms. The human body harbors an extensive microbiome, which has been shown to differ in patients with autoimmune diagnoses. Intracellular microbes slow innate immune defenses by dysregulating the vitamin D n...

VIVO is an open source semantic web platform that contains information about scholars and their interests and activities. This demonstration will highlight the platform and ontology, data sources, features of the software and the ways that VIVO data can be leveraged for a variety of purposes within and beyond an institution to facilitate collaborat...

Microbes are increasingly being implicated in autoimmune disease. This calls for a re-evaluation of how these chronic inflammatory illnesses are routinely treated. The standard of care for autoimmune disease remains the use of medications that slow the immune response, while treatments aimed at eradicating microbes seek the exact opposite-stimulati...

The prevailing theory of autoimmune disease, that the body creates autoantibodies that attack “self,” was developed during an era when culture-based methods vastly underestimated the number of microbes capable of persisting in and on Homo sapiens. Thanks to the advent of culture-independent tools, the human body is now known to harbor billions of m...

Researchers have noted that the incidence of autoimmune diseases, such as Hashimoto's thyroiditis, is markedly higher in women than in men, but to date the reason for this disparity has been unclear. The vitamin D nuclear receptor (VDR) is expressed in the human cycling endometrium. Because the VDR controls expression of the cathelicidin and beta-d...

Recent research has implicated vitamin D deficiency (serum levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D <50 nmol/L) with a number of chronic conditions, including autoimmune conditions such as multiple sclerosis, lupus, and psoriasis, and chronic conditions such as osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, metabolic syndrome, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. It has...

Vitamin D research is discussed in light of the hypothesis that the lower average levels of vitamin D frequently observed in autoimmune disease are not a sign of deficiency. Instead, it is proposed that the lower levels result from chronic infection with intracellular bacteria that dysregulate vitamin D metabolism by causing vitamin D receptor (VDR...

Studies of autoimmune disease have focused on the characteristics of the identifiable antibodies. But as our knowledge of the genes associated with the disease states expands, we understand that humans must be viewed as superorganisms in which a plethora of bacterial genomes – a metagenome – work in tandem with our own. The NIH has estimated that 9...

Early studies on vitamin D showed promise that various forms of the “vitamin” may be protective against chronic disease, yet systematic reviews and longer-term studies have failed to confirm these findings. A number of studies have suggested that patients with autoimmune diagnoses are deficient in 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25-D) and that consuming great...