Paul Laszlo Bollyky, MD, PhD
Photo: Paul L. Bollyky

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Elected 2018

Dr. Bollyky is an Immunologist and Infectious Disease physician at Stanford University. He is from Stanford, Connecticut, and graduated from Columbia Universty in 1994. He attended Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar and received his doctoral degree in 1998. He received his MD from Harvard Medical School in 2001 and subsequently completed his internship and residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. During his Infectious Disease fellowship training at the University of Washington, he received post-doctoral training in the lab of Dr. Jerry Nepom. He became an Assistant Professor at Stanford University in 2013.

Dr. Bollyky has identified novel roles for the tissue microenvironment in local immune dysregulation. In particular, he reported that the extracellular matrix polymer hyaluronan accumulates at sites of chronic inflammation and inhibits expansion of regulatory T-cells, a key population for the maintenance of immune tolerance. He then identified a repurposed drug, hymecromone, that inhibits hyaluronan synthesis and prevents autoimmunity in animal models of type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis. He and his team have initiated a clinical trial of this drug in humans. In addition to his work on autoimmunity, Dr. Bollyky also studies the basic mechanisms of local immune dysregulation in chronic wounds. These insights are opening up novel mechanistic and therapeutic avenues in autoimmunity and wound healing.