IAM-PIMS-MITACS Distinguished Colloquium Series: Rustom Antia (Emory University)
- Date: 11/29/2010
University of British Columbia
Recent Advances in Modeling Immune Responses Suggest Novel Approaches to Vaccination
Over the past decade we have dramatically changed our views of the
generation of immune responses. In the earlier (conventional) view, the
specific immune response to a pathogen was modeled by equations similar
to a simple predator-prey systems in ecology, with the immune response
being the predator, whose proliferation depended on the density of the
pathogen, and the pathogen the prey. I will outline recent experimental
and theoretical advances suggesting that the rules for the proliferation
of immune cells change dramatically over the course of infection. In
addition, the rules change in very different manner in acute and chronic
infections. I will use simple models to explore the consequences of
these rules for the generation of novel vaccination strategies against
influenza and malaria.
Rustom did his MS in Physics at IIT Bombay, PhD in Molecular and
Cellular Biology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a
post-doc at Imperial College in London, before joining the Department of
Biology at Emory University. He has broad interests in pathogen-host
interactions. Most of his work focuses on understanding the dynamics of
the pathogen and the immune responses, and the generation of
immunological memory. He is also interested in linking the dynamics of
infections at the within-host and between-host levels, as well as
exploring the evolution of pathogens and the emergence of new infectious
diseases.
3:00pm-4:00pm, LSK 301
This is the 2nd lecture of the 2010-11 IAM-PIMS-MITACS
Distinguished Colloquium Series. For full details, visit:
