The new Georgia Tech Center for ImmunoEngineering invites you to attend our ImmunoEngineering Trainee Seminar Series to bring together members of the bio community interested in and doing research in ImmunoEngineering.

Nassir Mokarram
Ravi Bellamkonda - PhD, Advisor

"Stimulating Peripheral Nerve Repair by Modulating Immune Response"

Nerve repair across long gaps remains clinically challenging and despite progress made with scaffolds presenting trophic factors, matching autograft performance has been limited. Here, we modulated the immune response after nerve injury, and defined a new term, regenerative bias, based on the ratio of M1 and M2 macrophage, and showed that rather than the extent of macrophage presence, their specific phenotype regulates the regenerative outcomes.

Swetha Srinivasan

Brandon Dixon, PhD, and Fredrik Vannberg, PhD - Advisors

"Understanding Immune Effector Functions of Exosomes in vitro and Transport through the Lymphatics in vivo"

Exosomes are nanovesicles (~50nm in diameter) that are released extracellularly by the fusion of large multivesicular endosomes with the host cell membrane. They carry functional cargo in the form of mRNA, microRNA and proteins from the cell of origin to the target cell, thereby acting as messengers in cell-cell communication. They are well characterized to play both immune-activatory as well as immunosuppressive roles in the body, however what determines this functionality is unknown.

Toll-like receptors (TLR’s) play an important role in the host cell defense against disease by detecting pathogen associated molecular patterns. The first objective of this research is to elucidate the role of exosomes obtained from cells under normal and stress conditions (such as bacterial and viral infection) and expound their contribution to modulating the state of recipient cells when grown with these exosomes.

The lymphatic system is found in most tissues of the body, and plays important roles in immune cell trafficking from the periphery to lymph nodes. The second objective is to understand the role of lymphatic transport under conditions of infection. It is believed that the lymphatics functionally respond to a peripheral infection and provide a rapid route of transit for exosomes to be delivered to the local draining lymph node and that this transport is essential to the resulting immune response in the node. This hypothesis has been tested this in vitro with lymphatic endothelial cell (LEC) permeability assays using transwells as well as in vivo using functional near infrared (NIR) lymphatic imaging developed by the Dixon lab. This talk will give an overview of my research as it pertains to the role of exosomes in modulating innate immunity in vitro and in vivo using a systems biology approach.