Lena Gerwick is a research scientist belonging to the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine. Her research interests involve the evolution and functional aspects of innate immunity and its role in inflammation. Since 1994 she has been researching the inflammatory response with the focus being the transcriptional response in the liver and the subsequent secretion of many of these proteins to the blood stream. Great strides have been made by her and others and today many of the inflammatory response proteins (acute phase proteins) have been sequenced and for some the expression pattern has been mapped.
Furthermore she is developing tools that can be used for screening of marine natural product for anti -inflammatory properties in an effort to develop anti-inflammatory leads.
In addition, several members of Lena’s laboratory are actively using modern techniques to determine mechanism of action and specific protein targets of selected natural products, in particular marine natural products showing anti-microbial or anti – inflammatory activity.

Another research area is the genomics of marine filamentous cyanobacteria to determine the capacity for these cyanobacteria to produce natural products.  The goal is to sequence the Gerwick laboratory cyanobacterial culture collection.