Special Joint Seminar with Chemical Engineering: Douglas Lauffenburger, Ph.D., Ford Professor of Biological Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Biology, MIT

Speaker:

Douglas Lauffenburger, Ph.D.

Ford Professor of Biological Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Biology                                             

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Faculty Host: Bradley Chmelka

Title: Systems Immunology Approach to Understanding and Predicting Hose Immune Responses to Pathogen Infection and Vaccine Treatment

Abstract:

Because of the complexity of immune responses to pathogens, our ability to gain insights and principles from experimental interrogation of blood and tissue samples, from human subjects as well as animal models, can be enhanced by computational analysis and modeling embracing an integrative systems perspective. Motivation for combined experimental/ computational systems analysis of multi-modal immune response data derives from fundamental issues: that concomitant contributions from multiple molecular and cellular features together govern observed responses, rather than any single feature being determinative, and that these multi-feature contributions typically are not independent but instead highly covarying. Appropriate computational modeling approaches can accommodate these issues and in fact offer enhanced capabilities in statistical power and biological interpretation. This talk will offer examples of application of this integrative systems immunology approach to a set of collaborative studies of host immune response in pathogen infection and vaccine treatment contexts.