Seminar by Prof Ankur Singh "Untangling Immunity Using Lymphoid Organoids and Immune Technologies"


This seminar will be held in the Kennedy Institute Lecture Theatre with the option to join via Zoom and is open only to Oxford University members. Registration at: https://medsci.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEtf-Gtrj8oE9Ls4Bd8-lCR4Lhb2HD85OVq

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.