NSI is a scientific association that arranges national and international meetings, organizes education seminars, workshops and public outreach programmes, as well as hosting social functions for its members. We are part of Scandinavian Society for Immunology.
Dear colleagues, The Translational Research Unit is happy to invite you to a seminar on immunotherapy presented by expert scientists from abroad.
We are grateful to the Barnekreftforening https://www.barnekreftforeningen.no/ (BKF) for supporting this event. We also extend our acknowledgements to the Norwegian society for Immunology (NSI) for sponsoring the coffee breaks.
You can find the detailed schedule and the speakers in the poster.
If you wish to discuss with one or more speakers, please contact Sebastien Philippe Wälchli – sebastw@ous-hf.no.
In our next NSI Rising Star Seminar, we will be hosting Tetsuo Hasegawa(PhD, group leader of Molecular Immunity, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, University of Cambridge) with a talk on “3D imaging of the synovium defines an intricate immunological defence system at the blood-joint barrier”. Look forward to seeing you there!
Meeting details: Speaker: Tetsuo Hasegawa Title: 3D imaging of the synovium defines an intricate immunological defence system at the blood-joint barrier Time and date: Thursday, May 15 at 14:00 Meeting link: https://uio.zoom.us/j/64508414976
Talk abstract: Joint pain or inflammation is a common and early feature of a variety of systemic diseases. These include autoimmune diseases, such as systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), as well as infection in organs distant to the musculoskeletal system, including enteric or genitourinary infections, which manifest as reactive arthritis. However, why joints are highly responsive to systemic inflammation and where in the joint the inflammation starts are still unknown. We sought to address these questions by developing a whole mount imaging system of the membrane that covers the joint cavity, called synovium, to profile the vascular, neuronal and immune microarchitecture. This revealed that highly permeable capillaries were specifically located at the lining-sublining interface, in the periphery of the synovium, enabling entry of circulating stimuli into the joint. This area of vulnerability was occupied by three subsets of macrophages that demonstrated distinct responses to systemic immune complex challenge and reciprocally interacted with nociceptor neurons, forming a blood-joint barrier (BJB) to defend joint tissue.
More information about Tetsuo Hasegawa: Dr. Hasegawa is an academic rheumatologist and received his medical degree from Keio University, Japan, in 2011. He went on to complete a Ph.D in the laboratory of Prof. Masaru Ishii at Osaka University, where he identified the pathological osteoclast precursor macrophages and elucidated the mechanism of bone destruction in arthritis. He then began his postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Prof. Menna Clatworthy at University of Cambridge through Human Frontier Science Program long-term fellowship. In 2024, He was awarded the Kennedy Trust Senior Research Fellowship to start his own group in University of Cambridge. His lab is generating a 3D molecular atlas of the membrane in the joint, called synovium, to investigate why joints are responsive to diverse systemic pathologies, how communication between synovial cells and nociceptors influences disease progression, and what mechanisms underlie immune-driven pain in the joints. Google scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=R0cIJygAAAAJ&hl=en
In our next NSI Rising Star Seminar, we will be hosting Søren E. Degn(PhD, Associate Professor, DFF Research Leader and Lundbeckfonden Ascending Investigator) with a talk on “B cells – the bad boys at the back of the bus”. Look forward to seeing you there!
Talk abstract: B cells are increasingly recognized not simply as precursors of antibody-producing cells, but as central players across a broad range of autoimmune diseases. In recent work, my group demonstrated that B cells can act as primary antigen-presenting cells priming proto-autoreactive T cells and driving epitope spreading in a murine model of systemic lupus erythematosus (Fahlquist-Hagert et al., Nature Communications 2023). Taking this as a starting point, I will touch upon recently published (Fahlquist-Hagert et al., iScience 2024) and unpublished work characterizing the role of T-follicular regulatory cells in curbing autoreactive germinal center responses, including the use of an intravital abdominal imaging window approach for longitudinal studies of immune processes in the spleen (https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.01.06.631523). Finally, I will present ongoing work, in which we have identified a previously unappreciated link between age-associated B cells and CD8 T cell activation and exhaustion.
More information about Søren E. Degn: Søren completed his BSc (2004) and MSc (2007) in Molecular Biology at Aarhus University. During his MSc, he spent a year at the Departments of Biochemistry and Immunology at the University of Toronto, Canada where he worked with Professor David E. Isenman. Søren then joined the laboratory of Professors Jens Chr. Jensenius and Steffen Thiel, where he completed his PhD in Immunology (2010), on the topic of the lectin pathway of complement. His thesis work included the discovery of a novel regulatory component of this pathway, the protein MAp44 (Degn et al., Journal of Immunology 2009). In the course of his PhD studies, Søren also worked for a year in the laboratory of Professor Michael C. Carroll at the Immune Disease Institute, Harvard Medical School, where he contributed to elucidating how influenza viral antigen is transported and presented in the draining lymph node in a vaccination setting (Gonzalez et al., Nature Immunology 2010). Following award of his PhD degree, Søren continued his work on the lectin pathway of complement as a postdoctoral fellow (2011-2013) with Professors Jens Chr. Jensenius and Steffen Thiel. In a series of papers (Degn et al., Journal of Immunology 2012; Degn et al., Journal of Immunology 2013; Degn et al., PNAS 2014), Søren presented a novel theory for the activation mechanism of the lectin pathway of complement. In 2013, he returned to the laboratory of Professor Michael C. Carroll, now at the Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine (PCMM) at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. During his Marie Curie Fellowship at the PCMM, Søren elucidated the clonal evolution of autoreactive germinal centers (Degn et al., Cell 2017), and built his expertise within lymphocyte biology using in vivo models and two-photon microscopy, forming the basis of his return to Aarhus University as a Group Leader and Assistant Professor in 2017. In March 2022, he was promoted to tenured Associate Professor at the Department of Biomedicine. Søren continues to work on autoimmune diseases (van der Poel et al., Cell Reports 2019; Juul-Madsen et al., PNAS 2021; Fahlquist-Hagert et al., Nature Communications 2023), but in recent years his attention has also turned to the molecular mechanism behind antigen-driven activation of the B-cell receptor (Ferapontov, Omer et al, Nature Communications 2023; Degn & Tolar, Nat. Rev. Immunol. 2024). Google scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=EyXW-8sAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
In our next NSI Rising Star Seminar, we will be hosting Anna Hammerich Thysen (Assistant Professor, Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Technical University of Denmark) with a talk on “Do dural brain border immune cells mediate brain fog in allergic asthma?”. Look forward to seeing you there!
Title of the talk: Do dural brain border immune cells mediate brain fog in allergic asthma?
Abstract: The Covid-19 pandemic emphasized the long-lasting neurological symptoms that accompany immune diseases of the lung. Individuals with airway allergy and asthma experience deficits in learning, memory and attention span; a so-called brain fog. For individuals with seasonal allergy, symptoms peak during the season of their allergen, suggesting a direct correlation between allergen dose and neurological response. Here, we address this otherwise overlooked symptom burden. Our hypothesis is that allergy-like immune cells at the dural brain border mediate the cognitive burden in airway allergy and asthma. We are establishing a mouse model for memory and learning deficits in allergic asthma. By combining our mouse model with high-dimensional flow cytometry, immunohistochemistry, single cell analysis, and genetic mouse models, our aim is to 1) map the immunological and neurological mechanisms underlying lung-to-brain cognitive symptoms; and to 2) design and test novel treatment strategies.
Bio: Dr. Anna Hammerich Thysen is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). Anna received her PhD degree from the Copenhagen Prospective Studies on Asthma in Childhood (COPSAC) under the supervision of Susanne Brix. Following collection of 189 immune cell and cytokine parameters in 541 infants; Anna identified discrete immune phenotypes in 18-months-old infants preceding the development of transient and persistent asthma at school age. During her postdoc in the lab of Katharina Lahl, Anna developed a neonatal re-infection model for respiratory syncytial virus in mice. Anna was able to show a critical role for cDC1 dendritic cells during healthy re-infection, and a lack of neonatal cDC1 DCs would lead to massive airway eosinophilia and type 2 immune pathology in adulthood. Anna then ventured into research in industry; first with neuroimmune diseases at Lundbeck and then allergy and asthma at ALK. As a solo mother of three young children, Anna is now in the initial stages of establishing her independent career with a research focus on type 2 immune regulation in the neuroimmune, viral, and neonatal aspects of airway disease.
Dear NSI members, NSI and the Norwegian Biochemical Society Oslo (NBS Oslo) jointly invites you to a guest lecture by Professor Kristian G Andersen (Scripps Research, La Jolla, USA), where he will give a lecture on “The origin of a pandemic – the facts and the fiction”.
Meeting details: Date/time: Thursday October 17th, 14:15-15:30 Location: Lille Auditorium, Domus Medica, UiO Gaustad Campus, https://link.mazemap.com/RDL5JFni Coffee/tea and refreshments are served from 14:00
Title of talk: The origin of a pandemic – the facts and the fiction
Short bio: Professor Andersen’s research interest is on host-pathogen interactions and his lab uses a broad array of approaches including sequencing, experiments, field work and computational methods. He has contributed much to the studies on Zika, Ebola, West Nile and Lassa viruses, and most recently, SARS-CoV-2, where he has been one of the key scientist investigating the origin of SARS-CoV-2.
Abstract: Understanding SARS-CoV-2’s origins is crucial for preventing future pandemics. Early reports and research identified Wuhan’s Huanan Market as a likely origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, but this hypothesis became controversial, with subject matter experts becoming frequent targets of rampant, and still-ongoing, conspiracism and political attacks. In a series of papers, our research has shown that the earliest COVID-19 cases, including those without direct links to the market, were both centered around on, and much closer to, the market than expected by chance. We also show that multiple species of likely intermediate hosts were for sale at the market, including clear genetic signatures of racoon dogs, bamboo rats, and civets co-mingling in samples also positive for SARS-CoV-2. Further, we found that virus and susceptible animal samples clustered in a specific corner of the market, exactly where wildlife was being sold prior to the start of the pandemic. Our phylodynamic analyses strongly suggest that at least two separate cross-species transmission events occurred in late November and early December 2019 at the market, with the timing of the early market outbreak corresponding to the start of the pandemic itself. Combined, our studies give us unprecedented insights into the origin of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic at a granularity never previously achieved, pointing to the unregulated wildlife trade in China as the culprit, and the Huanan Market as the early epicenter of SARS-CoV-2 emergence.
Dear colleagues, It’s our pleasure to invite you to a seminar on “Deciphering the antibody repertoire using antibody proteomics”.
Location: Rødt Auditorium, Rikshospitalet Time: Tuesday 24 Sept, 10.00–12.00 (Sweets and fruits will be served before the start of the seminar)
Three speakers: Dr. Albert Bondt, Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics group at Utrecht University. 45 min, gscholar: https://scholar.google.nl/citations?hl=nl&user=zSueyEkAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate Talk title: Top-down immunoglobulomics: starting from the end Brief abstract of talk: “Antibodies are widely recognized for their important role in immunity. Antibodies are protein products of completely matured and highly specialized B cells. Most of the research that is currently being done, however, starts from intermediate stages in B cell development. We take another route, and study antibodies starting from their final developmental stage, namely the circulating and secreted proteins. In my presentation I will share some of our main discoveries and future research directions. “
Douwe Schulte, Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics group at Utrecht University, 25 min Talk title: Bottom-up immunoglobulomics
