Senior Scientist
Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences
POOJA VIR, PhD, SENIOR SCIENTIST
UNIFORMED SERVICES UNIVERSITY and HENRY M JACKSON FOUNDATION, BETHEDSA, USA.
Dr. Pooja Vir received her Ph.D. from the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, India. Her early research work demonstrated that epithelial cells play an important role in host-pathogen interactions, and that these dictate the outcome of infection by modulating the pulmonary micro-environment. This work also addressed antigen-specific-host cell immune responses, especially the release of cytokines such as Interferon-gamma, Interleukin-4 and Transforming growth factor-beta. During her postdoctoral research at Public Health Research Institute (PHRI), Rutgers University, New Jersey, she have developed the flow cytometry based single-cell mRNA measurement assay (FISH-Flow) to identify antigen-specific T cell responses in peripheral blood cells from infected individuals. This involved flow-based T cell immuno-phenotyping to assess the antigen-specific cytokine production from different T cell subtypes. She joined Prof. Kathleen Pratt’s laboratory at USU in 2018 and has been characterizing both human and murine immune responses to the essential blood coagulation factor VIII, which are a major problem in hemophilia A. This project also addresses fundamental processes in allo- and autoimmune responses to proteins.
The present abstract describes her characterization of FVIII-specific CD4 T cells in blood from healthy non-hemophilia A donors. To detect these rare, often low-avidity T cells, Dr. Vir improved ELISPOT methodologies by incorporating co-stimulation, and by testing both FVIII-expanded lines and unexpanded PBMCs for responses to pooled and individual synthetic peptides spanning the FVIII protein sequence. Importantly, her systematic approach has confirmed FVIII specificity by identifying multiple FVIII peptide epitopes and by isolating FVIII-specific T-cell clones. These results indicate that anti-FVIII autoimmune responses are against multiple T-cell epitopes. The methods developed to un-mask these epitopes and responses will also be applicable to analysis of immune responses to other therapeutic and self-proteins.
Monday, July 11, 2022
2:45 PM – 3:00 PM