Dr Fabio Luciani
Rooms: Cairns B001-107, Townsville 39.252A
The seminar objectives are to:
- Facilitate the exchange of research in the field of tropical health and medicine.
- Foster new collaborations with research, business or industry partners
- Build and extend research networks and present research to a broad audience.
Virus-specific CD8+ T (CTL) cells play a pivotal role in protection from viral infection. Several viruses develop chronic infection, and the precise role of TCR diversity in controlling immune escape, and the overall differentiation pathways of CTL responses remains unclear. Better understanding of how protective T cell responses develop is required for development of vaccines.
I will review our recent studies on longitudinal samples from primary HCV infection using flow cytometry for phenotyping Ag-CTLs, along with single cell transcriptomic and T cell receptor diversity analyses. Future directions involve optimization and cost reduction of single cell transcriptomics and translation of the technology to other diseases.
Dr Fabio Luciani Bio
Dr Fabio Luciani was trained as theoretical physicist (Masters) and theoretical biologist (PhD 2006 from the Humboldt University of Berlin (Germany)). His research interests include the adaptive immune response against pathogens, computational models for studying host-pathogen interactions, and bioinformatics analysis of high throughput next generation sequencing data.
Dr Luciani has applied mathematical modelling to understand infectious diseases, focusing on transmission dynamics of drug resistant tuberculosis and the transmission of hepatitis C virus.
He has made several contributions in understanding how HCV infects a new host and the role of T cell mediated responses using next generation sequencing technologies, flow cytometry and statistical modelling.
More recently, he has moved into single cell genomics and systems immunology approaches for a more inclusive view of T cell dynamics in humans.
