On Friday, October 16th @ 11:00AM EDT, we welcome Prof. Donna Farber from Columbia University Irving Medical Center as she presents, "Human tissue immunity in health and COVID-19."

ABOUT THE WEBINAR

Immune responses take place in diverse anatomic sites including protective responses to pathogens, and maintenance of immune homeostasis. Most of our knowledge of human immune responses derives from the sampling of peripheral blood, though the majority of innate and adaptive immune cells reside in tissues, and do not enter circulation. In particular, tissue resident macrophages are major innate cells that populate different tissue sites and mount early responses to pathogens. T lymphocytes, the major components of the adaptive immune response also take up resident in tissues following an initial antigen exposure, and these tissue resident memory T cells can mediate optimal protective responses to site-specific infectious challenges. I will discuss our studies identifying tissue resident memory T cells and their role in protection to respiratory viruses in mouse models, and our studies on tissue-resident immune cells in humans using tissue samples obtained from organ donors using high dimensional transcriptome and protein profiling to identify tissue signatures and site-specific adaptations in human immune cells. I will also describe our recent findings on compartmentalization of immune responses in COVID-19, in paired respiratory and blood samples from intubated patients with severe COVID-19. We identified that the innate and adaptive response was largely centered in the airway and not overlapping with that in blood, and that immune pathology was driven by tissue macrophages producing multiple monocyte chemoattractant cytokines which recruit immature monocytes which differentiate to tissue resident inflammatory macrophages and perpetuate lung damage. These results on tissue immune responses in health and disease reveal the importance of site-specific profiling for determining disease mechanisms and potential therapeutic targets for modeling protection and immunopathology at the appropriate site.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Donna L. Farber, Ph.D. is the George H Humphreys, II Professor of Surgical Sciences (in Surgery) and Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Columbia University. The focus of Dr. Farber’s research is on adaptive immunity, particularly to virus infections and how T cell differentiate and generate long-term immunological memory in diverse tissues sites. Dr. Farber’s laboratory identified subsets of tissue-resident memory T cells in the lung that mediate protective immunity to respiratory virus infection and has led an initiative in translational immunology to dissect human immune responses in tissues throughout the body, in multiple mucosal and lymphoid tissues from individual organ donors of all ages. She has also made important contributions to understanding how T cells seed tissues and mediate responses to viruses during different life stages including infancy. Dr. Farber leads NIH/NIAID-funded Program grants on human immunity, anti-viral responses and is part of the Human Immunology Project Consortium (HIPC), as well as the NIH/NHLBI consortium on human lung aging. In addition to the NIH, her research is supported by the Helmsley Charitable trust and the Chan-Zuckerberg seed network for the Human Cell Atlas. She has over 140 publications and has served on numerous advisory committees for the NIH, American Association of Immunologists, Federation of Clinical Immunology Societies and others.

ABOUT THE 2020-2021 BME WEBINAR SERIES

The Department of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University is proud to host an annual weekly webinar series on the latest developments and research in Biomedical Engineering. The weekly series takes place on Friday mornings at 11:00AM Eastern and includes a variety of renowned academics from top universities to talk about their specific research and experience.

Register at the link above!