Dr. Jonathan Choy

Dr. Chou is a Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at Simon Fraser University, where his lab studies how the immune system attacks transplanted organs and how that damage can be prevented. His research centers on transplant immunology and nitric oxide biology, with recent work spanning three connected threads: how gut microbiota shape immune responses that drive transplant rejection, cell-surface engineering strategies that protect transplant blood vessels from immune-mediated injury, and how nitric oxide, a bioactive gas produced by nitric oxide synthase enzymes, regulates cell signaling in immune, vascular, and neurological contexts, with implications reaching into cancer and cardiovascular disease as well.

A throughline across this work is the endothelium, the layer of cells lining blood vessels, as the actual site of immune attack during rejection. His flagship finding showed that coating donor blood vessels with immunosuppressive polymers can protect this layer (the endothelial glycocalyx) and prevent rejection without suppressing the immune system body-wide, and his more recent projects extend that same protective, vessel-level approach using gut-microbiota manipulation and next-generation glycocalyx-mimicking polymers.

He's looking to collaborate with researchers running clinical or preclinical studies in eye vasculature, seeing that as the most direct complement to his lab's expertise in vascular immunology and vessel protection.