Faculty & Scientific Staff

Background

Allyson Byrd received her B.S. in Genetics from the University of Georgia and her Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from the Boston University/National Institutes of Health Partnership Program. Her dissertation was on the skin microbiome in health and disease. After graduation, Allyson joined Genentech as a Principal Investigator in the Cancer Immunology department. There she leveraged clinical samples to understand how gut microbes impact response to checkpoint inhibitors. In 2024, Allyson joined the faculty of Benaroya Research Institute as an Assistant Member where she is continuing to pursue microbiome science.

Area of Research

Dr. Byrd’s laboratory is focused on understanding broadly how gut microbiomes as well as those present in tissues impact systemic immunity and response to therapies. To accomplish this, the Byrd lab collaborates with clinicians around the world to generate multi-omic clinical datasets which we leverage to discover actionable insights into how microbial factors associate with and influence disease development, therapeutic response, and immune system activation in patients with cancer and immune-medicated diseases.

The Byrd lab has prioritized a reverse translation approach wherein microbial species, metabolites and immune profiles discovered in clinical data are used to experimentally determine how these microbes impact disease. Understanding the functional capacity of the microbiome to directly or indirectly impact immune system function is a central tenet of the Byrd lab approach, simply knowing which taxa is insufficient to understand the role these microbes play on our physiology. Overall, we believe a human-first based approach, with strict requirement for reproducibility, is essential to provide new mechanistic and actionable insights into how gut microbes impact systemic immunity and therapeutic responses.