Dr. Sebastián A. Riquelme is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Pediatrics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC). His research interest is immunometabolism, and he studies how the airway metabolic response to infection regulates pneumonia against multiple bacterial organisms. Dr. Riquelme’s work focuses in characterizing the metabolic pathways in phagocytes and lymphocytes that promote bacterial eradication from the lung, as well as dissecting the mechanisms by which certain pathogens evade these metabolic responses to cause disease. In a series of studies, he demonstrated that susceptibility to pulmonary infection is regulated by function of the phosphatase PTEN, which limits the release of mitochondrial metabolites during pneumonia. Dr. Riquelme determined that PTEN is a binding partner of CFTR, the gene mutated in individuals with cystic fibrosis (CF), and that CFTR-PTEN complex dysfunctions induce accumulation of metabolites such as succinate and itaconate that enable pneumonia by pathogens like Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus. Currently, his group is working on defining how these opportunists exploit these and other metabolic networks like ketogenesis and nucleotide synthesis to cause lung disease, and how this is linked with their capacity to develop biofilms in the host airway. The long-term goal of Dr. Riquelme’s team is to develop translational approaches to target both these and other metabolic routes to prevent from pneumonia, thus providing with alternative therapies to treat pulmonary infectious diseases. The focus of his laboratory on immunometabolism approaches pneumonia through an original standpoint, which requires use of state-of-the-art techniques to analyze the biochemical crosstalk between host and pathogen. Dr. Riquelme works closely in collaboration with multiple researchers and physicians from the Department of Medicine and Pediatrics at CUIMC, as well as with multiple national and international groups. He studies bacterial clinical isolates derived from acutely and chronically infected subjects, which substantially differ in genetics, metabolism, and mechanisms of pathogenesis in respect with the classical used laboratory strains. Thus, the research led by Dr. Riquelme is translational, as it addresses the intricate metabolic interaction between bacteria and immune cells in the human lung.