WEHI Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Special Seminar hosted by James Fu, Mengbo Li and Tony Papenfuss

Professor Fabio Luciani

Systems Immunology and Machine Learning, School of Medical Sciences – University of New South Wales

 

Identifying aberrant Immune cells in autoimmunity and cancer, lessons from celiac disease and CAR T cells

Davis Auditorium

Join via ZOOM

Including Q&A

Aberrant immune cell populations play critical roles in both autoimmune diseases and cancer, yet their identification and functional characterisation remain challenging. In this seminar, I will present how single-cell multi-omic technologies are transforming our ability to define rare and pathogenic immune subsets in clinical settings. Using celiac disease as a model, I will show how our analyses of duodenal biopsies from patients with refractory celiac disease (RCD) uncovered the presence of CD3-negative lymphoid cells and CD3-positive T cells carrying lymphoma driver mutations. These clonally expanded, mutation-bearing cells display inflammatory and cytotoxic signatures and may underpin chronic inflammation and lymphomagenesis in RCD. I will also highlight insights from CAR T cell therapy, where we use single-cell transcriptomic and proteomic profiling to dissect the molecular features of therapeutic T cells and notably the extreme case where CAR T cells caused T cell lymphoma in the patients. By integrating these two disease contexts, we gain mechanistic understanding of how immune surveillance can be subverted, and how precision analytics can guide both diagnostics and therapy in immune-mediated diseases and cancer.

Professor Fabio Luciani is a leading expert in systems immunology and single-cell genomics at the School of Biomedical Sciences, UNSW Sydney, and a Visiting Fellow at Weill Cornell Medicine (NYC). With over 19 years of research experience, he has pioneered the use of single-cell technologies to study rare, antigen-specific immune cells in autoimmunity, infection, and cancer. He has authored more than 160 publications (H-index: 47, ~8,000 citations), secured over $35M in national and international funding, and delivered over 50 invited talks globally. His work bridges cutting-edge genomics with translational immunology, driving innovations in precision immune therapies.

All welcome!