OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
For many life-threatening global infectious diseases effective vaccinations are still lacking. There are numerous challenges in understanding disease transmission, pathology and developing new vaccines, including a limited understanding of immune correlates of protection, identification of viable vaccine candidates, and off-target effects that must be evaluated in staged clinical trials. To generate these antibodies, B cells are activated by T cells to form germinal centers, which are sub-anatomical structures in the B cell follicles of lymph nodes. In germinal centers, B cells rapidly proliferate and mutate to form somatically mutated high-affinity antibody secreting cells. In this talk, I will discuss my laboratory’s effort in developing ex vivo immune organoids using cells from both young and aged individuals to generate antibody secreting cells in a dish or as organ-on-chip against viral infections and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. We further elucidate the role of epigenetic modifiers, such as EZH2, in these responses. Finally, I will discuss development of nanoscale technologies to modulate the differentiation trajectories of T cells against infectious diseases.
