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
The immune system consists of two parts: innate immunity and adaptive immunity. T cells and B cells in the adaptive immune system are two major players to mount an antigen-specific defense and offer long-term protection. However, due to the immune tolerance and immunodominance mechanisms, some T cells and B cells can recognize the antigens but couldn’t develop effective immune responses.
My research focus is using synthetic biomaterials to engineer the innate immune system and unlock the non-responsive adaptive immune repertoire for new cancer immunotherapies and infectious disease vaccines. In this seminar, two examples illustrating my research work will be described. In the first example, I develop a toll-like receptor 7 agonist-based nanoparticle (TLR7-NP) adjuvant to alter germinal center (GC) signaling and induce high levels of cross-reactive antibody responses to multiple heterologous viral variants of influenza and SARS-CoV-2.
The second example is to design a nanoparticle platform to reverse the anergy of tumor infiltrating self-specific CD8+ T cells for creating a new and effective immunotherapeutic strategy for treating broad cancer patients.
