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Biography

Joseph Wagner is a Post Doc. at the Enteric Virus Group, Murdoch Childrens Research Institute at the Royal Childrens Hospital Melbourne, Australia. At the current position he is leading together with their primary lab head and mentor Dr. Carl Kirkwood the project "Understanding the role of infectious agents as a trigger of Crohns disease in children with early onset disease".  This project aims to characterize bacteria and viruses that may act as a trigger for Crohn’s disease in children. One model of Crohn’s disease suggests that it is initiated in susceptible individuals by an infectious agent, or agents, capable of triggering tissue injury that is persistent and immune-mediated. They have conducted a series of preliminary experiments designed to identify an infectious agent in mucosal biopsy tissue that was obtained at initial endoscopic examination of children with suspected Crohn’s disease. Since his employment,he has supervised two honours student, one MD scholar and co-supervised 1 PhD student. Currently, he is responsible for the laboratory training of two junior gastroenterologists doing a PhD.
 

Research Interest

Joseph Wagner main research interest is paediatric Crohn’s disease. In their research they are analysing gut mucosal biopsies for bacteria and viruses (known and unknown) which might play an important role in the development of Crohn’s disease.  They have investigated the role of Mycobacterium, Pseudomonas, and Burkholderia bacteria in biopsy specimens. They also genotyped all their patient cohort for the most common 34 SNPs associated with Crohn’s disease and performed association studies with bacterial infection. Currently, he is using Roche 454 next generation sequencing platform to analyse bacterial changes in post operative endoscopic adult Crohn’s disease recurrence patients. Also, Roche 454 is currently used to analyse the viral population in biopsy specimens of paediatric Crohn’s disease patients. In summary, his expertise is in microbial involvements in Crohn’s disease, genetic implication in Crohn’s disease and metagenomic analysis of the gut flora using latest bio-informatics software including, MOTHUR and MEGAN.
 

Certificate

Publications

Bacterial Dysbiosis Associated With Crohn's Disease: Advances in Gut Metagenomic Analysis