research

THE ADAPTIVE IMMUNE SYSTEM - MOSTLY FRIEND, SOMETIMES FOE

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 infections diseases, cancer and autoimmunity.

EXPERIMENTS IN NATURE

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. 

UNDERSTANDING & ENGINEERING

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.