The adaptive immune system protects from infectious diseases and cancer, but can also cause autoimmunity.
Vaccinations – today as important as ever – induce immunological memory to protect from infections. The adoptive transfer of T cells represents an exciting new field of medicine for the treatment of infectious diseases and cancer. Novel tolerogenic therapies for autoimmune diseases are being developed based on new insights in T cell targets relevant for disease pathogenesis.
The Schober Lab aims at understanding and engineering human T cell immunity in order to develop preventive and therapeutic strategies against infectious diseases, cancer and autoimmunity.
To this end, we investigate the composition and evolution of human antigen-specific T cell responses over space and time. For us, routine vaccinations and patients receiving T cell therapies serve as “experiments in nature”, which inform us on the biology of human T cell responses in a defined and systematic context.
To investigate human antigen-specific T cell responses, we use state-of-the-art T cell receptor (TCR) sequence analyses, single-cell metabolic profiling, flow cytometry, single-cell transcriptomics as well as bioinformatic analyses in collaboration with machine-learning experts.
Having identified disease-relevant TCRs of interest, we employ advanced genetic engineering tools such as CRISPR/Cas9 to reprogram T cells in a highly precise fashion. In analogy to the field of bionics, physiological T cells for us represent a blueprint for functional and safe engineered therapeutic T cell products.
Finally, we build on recent developments in the field of genome-wide T cell epitope discovery to elucidate novel targets of pathogens, cancer and autoimmunity.