“High-throughput T Cell Repertoire Profiling Enabled Systems Immunology and Immune Engineering”

Ning Jiang, Ph.D.*
Associate Professor
Department of Biomedical Engineering
The University of Texas at Austin

ABSTRACT

Various T cells based cancer immunotherapies have been quite effective in treating several types of cancers. However, to further improve the efficacy of T cell based cancer immunotherapy or make it available to other types of cancers requires us to have a comprehensive understanding of the complex T cells repertoire and their interaction with cancer. In the past several years, we have developed three tools to profile the T cell repertoire from T cell receptor diversity to T cell receptor affinity to high-throughput linking antigen specificity to single T cell receptor sequences in large scale. In this talk, I will first introduce these tool and then give examples on how we use them to answer some of the fundamental questions in systems immunology, which in turn help us design new approaches in immune engineering.

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Jiang is an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. She did her Ph.D. training in the laboratory of Dr. Cheng Zhu at Georgia Institute of Technology where she developed a tool to measure T cell receptor affinity on T cell membrane and used it to study molecular mechanisms of T cell receptor antigenic ligand discrimination. Before joining the faculty at UT Austin in January 2012, she was a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Stephen Quake’s lab at Stanford University where she developed the first generation of high-throughput immune repertoire sequencing technology. Her lab at UT Austin focuses on systems immunology by developing technologies that enable the direct profiling of human immune systems in infection, vaccination, and cancer. These technologies include a 2nd generation of immune repertoire sequencing technology that increases the accuracy 150 times, a high-throughput T cell receptor affinity and sequence test, and a high-throughput tool to link antigen specificity to T cell receptor sequences. Dr. Jiang is the recipient of the prestigious NIH Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00), Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovator Award, NSF CAREER Award, and recently the Neurodegeneration Challenge Network Ben Barres Early Career Acceleration Award.

Host:  Kyle Allison