Strategies for immune monitoring and disease detection in CAR T-cell therapy

Alberto Orfao is currently Full Professor of Immunology at the Department of Medicine of the University of Salamanca. He is also subdirector of the Cancer Research Center, Director of the General Cytometry Service and the Cell sorting Service of the University of Salamanca, and Scientific Director of the Spanish National DNA Bank Carlos III and the Network of Tumor Biobanks of Castilla y Leon (Spain). His research activities are based on his position as one of the Principal Investigators of the Cancer Research Center and The Institute for Biomedical Research of Salamanca (IBSAL), and they are mainly focused on the field of hematological malignancies and the relationship between the immune system and cancer development and progression. He has contributed to >800 publications and book chapters, being co-author of >690 scientific papers in international journals, with an overall h-index of 79 and more than 35,000 accumulated citations; in addition, he is inventor of 50 (granted/pending) patents. He has received over 40 awards and recognitions including the Berend Howen award of the International Society for Laboratory Hematology and Wallace Coulter award of the International Society for Clinical Cytometry, the 2012 Castilla and Leon Prize for Scientific and Technical Research as well as the 3rd Prize in Applied Biomedical Research of the Valdes-Salas Foundation. He is currently member of the external scientific committees of several research institutions in Spain and other European countries, and he is member of multiple national and international scientific evaluation panels and groups, including the EuroFlow Consortium (chair), European Scientific Foundation for Laboratory Hemato-Oncology (ESLHO) and the European Leukemia Net (ELN). He is/has been also member of the editorial board of several scientific journals, such as Leukemia, Haematologica, Blood Research, Human Genetics and Cytometry. In parallel he has supported and fostered the creation of several new Biotech companies in Salamanca, including Cytognos SL (1997) and ImmunoStep (2001) very successful in the field of Clinical Cytometry and Immunology/Hematology and more recently 300K Biotech (2019) in the field of biobanking.

Immune profiles in COVID-19 patients 

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Utility of flow cytometry for the diagnosis and classification of primary immunodeficiencies

Since 2008, C. Bonroy is staff member at the Department of Laboratory Medicine (supervisor of the non-infectious serology and cellular immunology lab, co-supervisor of the hematology lab) of the Ghent University Hospital (UZG, Belgium) and, since 2018, she is assistant professor at the Department of diagnostics sciences of University Ghent (UG, Belgium). Within UZG, she is responsible (in collaboration with Dr. M. Hofmans) for the first-line immunological and flow cytometric (FCM) assays performed in the context of diagnosis and follow-up of primary immunodeficiency patients (PID). From this perspective, she also participates in the multidisciplinary team of the Centre for PID Ghent (CPIG) for the diagnostic elaboration of PID patients. C. Bonroy and colleagues have expertise in FCM analysis in different clinical settings (including PID), and perform translational research with focus on extended FCM characterization in PID/CVID and the use of computational tools for FCM data analysis (collaboration with Prof. Saeys, UG). The research group of C. Bonroy/ M. Hofmans is active member of the Euroflow Consortium (see https://euroflow.org) and the national VIB Grand Challenge PID consortium aiming at understanding pathogenesis of PID and developing (molecular) diagnostic/prognostic tools to better stratify patients and guide therapeutic decisions.

Dissection of myeloid hematopoietic compartment by next generation flow cytometry 

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Maternal fetal immune cross talk
 

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Pre-existing polymerase-specific T cells expand in abortive seronegative SARS-CoV-2 infection

Mala Maini is a Professor of Viral Immunology in the Division of Infection and Immunity at UCL, London and also works as a Consultant Physician in the viral hepatitis clinic. Her lab researches liver immunity and immunopathology, focusing on cellular interactions and metabolic constraints. By dissecting the immune correlates of viral persistence and liver damage, the Maini lab contributes to the development of novel immunotherapeutic strategies for hepatitis B and hepatocellular carcinoma. During the pandemic the Maini lab has partly switched to work on the immunology of COVID-19 and Mala is one of 5 Theme Leads for the UK-Coronavirus Immunology Consortium. Work in the Maini lab is funded by her Wellcome Investigator award as well as Cancer Research UK, EU Horizon 2020, NIHR, MRC, Medical Research Foundation, British Infection Association.
See: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/maini-group and @maini_lab

Immune surveillance of the liver

Matteo Iannacone obtained a M.D. degree from the University of Milan, Italy, followed by a residency in Internal Medicine and a Ph.D. in Immunology from Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan, Italy. He trained as a postdoctoral fellow at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA and at Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA. Since 2010, he directs the Dynamics of Immune Responses Laboratory at the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan, Italy. By combining cutting-edge in vivo imaging techniques and advanced animal models, Matteo has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the immune response and viral-induced immunopathology. His work has been published in the most important scientific journals (including Nature, Cell, Science, Immunity, Nature Medicine, Nature Immunology) and he holds 14 international patents. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Armenise-Harvard Foundation Career Development Award, an ERC Starting Grant, the Young Investigator Award from the European Association for the Study of the Liver, the EMBO Young Investigator Award, an ERC Consolidator Grant, the Chiara D’Onofrio Award, an ERC Proof of Concept Grant. He is an elected member of the Henry Kunkel Society and of EMBO. As of January 2022, his work has received more than 8300 citations with an H-index of 40.

Expanding the immunotherapy toolbox for the treatment of colorectal cancer

Noel de Miranda is Associate Professor and Principal Investigator of the Cancer Immunogenomics research group at the Leiden University Medical Center, The Netherlands. His group develops work on several aspects on cancer immunology and genomics with a particular focus on colorectal and pancreatic cancers. The group’s research aims are to: 1) define cancer-specific antigens that can be targeted by immunotherapy and 2) elucidate the potential of immune cell subsets other than conventional T cells for immunotherapeutic exploitation. These aims are accompanied by a strong curiosity in understanding and mapping out the complex and multicellular nature of anti-cancer immune responses.

Human immune system variation and development

Petter Brodin is Garfield Weston Chair and Professor of pediatric immunology at Imperial College London and professor of pediatric immunology at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. The Brodin lab (https://brodinlab.com/) develops and applies novel experimental and computational methods to describe human immune system variation with a particular interest in the immune systems of children, its development early in life, and its role in health and disease during childhood.
After completing a MD/PhD program at the Karolinska Institute, Brodin joined the Mark M Davis’s laboratory at HHMI, Stanford University School of Medicine as a postdoctoral fellow, investigating the contribution of heritable and non-heritable sources of variation in immune systems of twins (Brodin et al, Cell, 2015). Following this, Brodin returned to Sweden to establish a national facility for immunomonitoring at the Swedish infrastructure hub, Science for Life Laboratory. He also established his own research program applying systems-immunology methods to the study of immune system development early in life. The Brodin lab established a birth cohort and showed differences in early life adaptation between preterm and term infants (Olin et al, Cell, 2018), the global repertoire of maternal antiviral antibodies (Pou et al, Nat. Med, 2019) as well as the imprinting effect of select colonizing microbes such as bifidobacterial early in life (Henrick et al, Cell, 2021). The Brodin lab has also applied its technologies for systems-level immune system analysis during the COVID-19 pandemic to understand the immunology of MIS-C (Consiglio et al, Cell, 2020) and severe COVID-19 (Rodriguez et al, Cell Reports Med, 2020) and are active members of the global COVID-Human Genetic Effort (https://www.covidhge.com/).

Human immune monitoring coming of age

Shai Shen-Orr is an Associate Prof. at the Faculty of Medicine at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, where he heads the Systems Immunology & Precision Medicine laboratory since 2012. His lab develops novel analytics for studying the immune system—tools which he applies to study the drivers of immune variation and to further Immune-based Precision Medicine.
Prof. Shen-Orr received a BSc from the Technion in Information Systems (1999), an M.Sc. in Bioinformatics at the Weizmann Institute of Science (2002), a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Harvard University (2007), and he conducted his postdoctoral studies at Stanford University. His research has been cited in numerous publications and featured in systems biology textbooks.
Prof. Shen-Orr’s research laid the foundation for CytoReason, a company building a computational platform for modeling disease with the long-term vision of transforming the field of biology where computational human body simulation are a central tenant in biomedical research. CytoReason is using its human disease modeling platform in collaboration with leading pharma companies to accelerate drug development, reduce costs and make precision medicine a reality.

Innate immune evasion revealed in the zebrafish Avatar model

Rita Fior is a Developmental Biologist, fascinated by how cells interact with each other, to deliver instructions, to collaborate, to compete or synchronize their actions. From studying chick neurogenesis and Notch signaling during her PhD, she then moved on to study zebrafish somitogenesis in her Post-Doc. Throughout her career Fior was always interested in the transcriptional networks and cellular interactions that lead to differentiation and stem cell maintenance. By the end of her Post–Doc under the supervision of Leonor Saúde (iMM, PT) and Julian Lewis (FRS, CRUK), she became interested in cancer. This change in her scientific interest started with the awareness that there are several equivalent chemotherapy options, but no available test to determine the best therapy for each individual patient.
With this goal, Fior optimized and challenged the zebrafish larvae xenograft model to test if it could reveal inter- and intra-tumor heterogeneity and differential response to therapy (Fior et al, 2017, PNAS). A groundwork to develop zebrafish patient derived xenografts (zPDX) or zAvatars for personalized medicine. The Fior Lab is actively testing the predictive power of these larval zAvatars in colorectal and breast cancer, with very promising results (Costa, Ferreira et al, 2020, EBiomedicine, Rebelo Almeida et al, 2020 Comm Biology, Varanda et al, 2020, Cancers). In parallel, the Lab is investigating the cellular and molecular interactions that occur between human tumor cells and zebrafish innate immunity to discover new mechanisms of innate immune evasion (Póvoa et al 2021, Nature Comm).
Rita has also extensive experience in teaching in several Master and PhD programs and was author and co-editor of a text book in Molecular and Cell Biology of Cancer, Springer (Fior and Zilhão, 2019).

Turning Sweet in Immunity: complex N-glycans as immune-checkpoints in infection, inflammation and autoimmunity.

Salomé Pinho received her D.V.M. from the University of Porto in 2004 and developed her PhD research in cancer glycobiology at the Institute of Molecular Pathology and Immunology of Univ. Porto (IPATIMUP) and at Boston Medical School, MA, USA from 2006 to 2009. She performed her postdoctoral work at IPATIMUP exploiting the glyco-Immunology field in the context of chronic inflammatory disorders such as Inflammatory Bowel Disease. At present, she is Principal Investigator at i3S-University of Porto and Professor at Faculty of Medicine at University of Porto. She coordinates a research group “Immunology, Cancer & GlycoMedicine” at i3S and her research activity is focused on the understanding of the role of glycosylation in the regulation of key proteins´ functions involved in cancer and in chronic inflammatory conditions, envisioning potential clinical applications. She is author of several publications in international peer-reviewed journals (as first and senior author) including Nature Reviews Cancer, Oncogene, PNAS, Gastroenterology, among others. She supervises a research team composed by Post-Docs, PhD students, Master students and young researchers. She is the Principal Investigator of several national/international grants in the field of cancer glycobiology and glyco-immunology. She received the “Young Investigator Award” from the European Association for Cancer Research (2012), the 2020 Glycobiology Significant Achievement Award by the American Society for Glycobiology (SfG) and recently the Pfizer Award 2021.

Host-Pathogen interactions for the study of tuberculosis

Margarida Saraiva obtained a degree in Biochemistry (Hons) in 1997, by Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto, Portugal. After 4 years (1999-2002) of research on Poxvirus Immune Evasion, in Antonio Alcami’s lab, Margarida Saraiva obtained a PhD in Pathology awarded by the University of Cambridge, UK, and moved to Anne O’Garra’s lab, at the MRC-National Institute for Medical Research (London). During her post-doc, Margarida Saraiva investigated the molecular mechanisms that regulate the expression of interleukin-10 by immune cells. In 2015, Margarida Saraiva became a group leader at i3S-Porto to study the molecular mechanisms underlying immune regulation using deregulated myelopoiesis and tuberculosis as disease models. Margarida Saraiva has published 64 articles in journals, gathering over 4200 citations; successfully supervised several MSc, PhD and Post-doctoral fellows; has been PI in several competitive funded grants; has been invited speaker in various international conferences and institutes; and has been awarded several national and international prizes for her research. Margarida Saraiva acts as an Editor for Immunology Letters and Immunity, Inflammation and Disease; and served as President of the Portuguese Society for Immunology between 2018-2021.

Trained immunity: consequences for vaccination

Mihai Netea was born and studied medicine in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. He completed his PhD at the Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands, on studies investigating the cytokine network in sepsis. After working as a post-doc at the University of Colorado, he returned to Nijmegen where he finished his clinical training as an infectious diseases specialist, and where he currently heads the division of Experimental Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine, Nijmegen University Nijmegen Medical Center. He is mainly interested in understanding the factors influencing variability of human immune responses, the biology of sepsis and immunoparalysis in bacterial and fungal infections, and the study of the memory traits of innate immunity. He is the recipient of the Spinoza Prize 2016 and an ERC Advanced grant in 2019, and member of the Netherlands Royal Academy of Science (KNAW).