On behalf of the Norwegian Society for Immunology (NSI) and the Center for Pandemics and One-Health Research (P1H) at UiO, it is our pleasure to invite you to a seminar on June 5, from 14.15-15.30 in Lille Auditorium (A1.1004), Domus Odontologica.
For those who cannot attend in person, the seminars will also be online via zoom ( https://uio.zoom.us/j/
Program
Daniel Lingwood, University of Harvard
Eliciting a single amino acid change by vaccination generates antibody protection against group 1 and group 2 influenza A viruses.
Margaret Sällberg Chen, Karolinska Institute
The host microbiome and mRNA vaccination.
Speaker biographies:
Daniel Lingwood is an Assistant Professor at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, and his many great papers are pushing frontier knowledge on antibody formation. Lingwood has with his team identified natural gene-encoded pattern recognition motifs on human B cell receptors (BCRs), and shown that these can be triggered to re-center antibody output against ‘difficult-to-see’ vaccine targets. These have included functionally conserved broadly neutralizing antibody (bnAb) sites on hypervariable pathogens (e.g. influenza virus, HIV, SARS-CoV-2 and gram-negative bacteria). Key to these discoveries were his engineering of transgenic mouse systems which recapitulate human antibody diversity and development. Immunization of these animals with germline-engaging vaccines succeeded in selectively expanding the corresponding gene-encoded human humoral response pathways, resulting in first in kind elicitation of high titer broadly protective serum antibodies. Lingwood has further demonstrated that this humoral output can be controlled by subtle polymorphisms within the antibody gene sequence. Collectively, this work defines novel immunological solutions for rationally steering B cell and antibody development to broadly neutralize hypervariable pathogens that can ‘resist’ conventional vaccine approaches.
https://ragoninstitute.org/
Margaret S. Chen is Professor of Clinical Oral Immunology at Karolinska Institutet (KI), and has a DDS and PhD in oral microbiology and virology from KI. Her postdoctoral training was at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California, where she studied antiviral T cells and TCR repertoires. Returning to Sweden in 1999, she joined the Public Health Agency of Sweden as a Staff Scientist, with her team working on RNA vaccine development and cancer immunotherapy research. Currently, she leads a research group with topics that primarily centers around immune strategies against infections and cancer, with a specific interest in the host microbiota dysbiosis and immune-microbial interactions in precision health and medicine.
Welcome to the seminar!