Seminar

Tuesday, September 10th, 2024

14h

Centre de recherche - Paris - Amphithéâtre Marie Curie

B cell memory in barrier tissues - " From the bench to the bedside: cancer immunotherapy with soluble T cell receptors"

B cell memory in barrier tissues

During infection, the immune system unleashes protective responses to fight against the pathogen while also establishes a memory compartment that will provide protection in case of a subsequent pathogen encounters. The B cell memory compartment is composed of two layers: long-lived plasma cells (LLPCs) and memory B cells (MBCs). LLPCs mainly migrate to the bone marrow, where they continuously secrete high-affinity antibodies and provide protection against re-infection with the same pathogen for years or even for lifetime. In contrast, MBCs remain in a quiescent state in secondary lymphoid organs (spleen and lymph nodes) until a future encounter with the same pathogen or a variant. Only then, MBCs will proliferate and differentiate into antibody-secreting plasma cells to provide a rapid and effective protective response, or re-enter germinal centre reactions, where they will diversify the memory repertoire. In the last years, it became evident than LLPCs and MBCs not only remain in lymphoid organs but further take residence in barrier tissues upon mucosal infections. During my talk, I will discuss how distinct barrier tissues, such as the lungs and the gut, use different B cell memory strategies to fight recurrent pathogens.

From the bench to the bedside: cancer immunotherapy with soluble T cell receptors

Cancer Immunotherapy has come of age in the last 15 years, with the success of checkpoint inhibitors, CAR-T cell therapy and adoptive T cell therapy. At Immunocore we develop soluble TCRs as therapeutics for cancer immunotherapy, autoimmune and infectious diseases. I will give an overview of the platform, the mechanism of action of TCR engagers and the challenges to develop new, HLA-unrestricted, therapeutics.

Speaker(s)

Mauro Gaya
Group Leader

Centre d'Immunologie de Marseille Luminy

Mariolina Salio
Director, Research, Experimental Immunology

Immunocore LTD, Abingdon UK

Invited by

Mariela Furstenheim

Institut Curie

Olivier Lantz

Institut Curie

Contact

Sylvia Trival

Send an e-mail

To sum up

Mauro Gaya obtained his BSc degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Buenos Aires (2011, Argentina) and his PhD from the University College London (2015, UK). He performed his PhD work at the London Research Institute in the laboratory of Dr. Facundo Batista. While there, he uncovered a role for lymph node resident macrophages in the induction of B cellresponses upon infection (Gaya et al. Science 2015). Mauro Gaya performed a short postdoctoral stage in between the Francis Crick Institute (London, UK) and the Ragon Institute of MIT and Harvard (Cambridge, USA) still with Dr. Batista. His work led to the discovery of how innate T cell populations initiate the seeding of germinal center reactions during infection (Gaya et al. Cell 2018). Mauro Gaya was recruited to the Luminy Center for Immunology (Marseille, France) in 2018, where he studies Bcell immunity in barrier tissues (Gregoire et al. Immunity 2022). During this period, Dr Gaya became a Marie Curie fellow, tenured researcher at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) and EMBO Young Investigator. At present, his lab is financed by the ERC Starting Grant program to study the role of IgA in B cell memory.

Mariolina Salio obtained her degree in Medicine from the University of Torino, Italy and worked at Mount Sinai Hospital, Harvard Medical School and the Basel Institute for Immunology before joining the MRC Human Immunology Unit in Oxford, where she worked in close collaboration with Enzo Cerundolo for over 20 years. In 2022 she joined the commercial stage biotech Immunocore, which pioneered the first TCR therapy.

Mariolina Salio has a long-standing interest in the interface between innate and adaptive immunity, and her research has focussed on the mechanisms of DC activation by NKT cells and more recently by MAIT cells. Ultimately, her interest lies in designing strategies to harness innate-like T cells, including gd T cells, and their TCRs, to improve adaptive immunity in cancer.