Systems Immunology Research Group

How does our immune system distinguish between billions of molecules? What are the main determinants of immune recognition? What factors explain that certain people are more likely to get infections or cancer, while others are protected from these diseases?

My research group aims to answer these questions. We focus on the adaptive immune system, which recognizes specific molecular motifs of pathogens, cancer and our self-cells. While this system is extremely completed, it is controlled by some less complicated laws, which we intend to characterize in detail. For example, while one would expect that the immune system is more likely to recognize molecular motifs that are highly dissimilar to our self-molecules, we showed that overly high dissimilarity hinders immune recognition. Moreover, adaptive immune recognition is largely influenced by diverse genetic factors resulting in variable susceptibility to infections, cancer and autoimmune diseases. We are focusing on a group of the most important proteins in adaptive immune recognition, the genetically extremely variable HLA molecules.