Clonal and Cellular Dynamics of the Antibody Response

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Gabriel D. Victora, Ph.D., Laurie and Peter Grauer Associate Professor and head, Laboratory of Lymphocyte Dynamics, The Rockefeller University

Speaker bio(s)

Antibodies are critical to immune protection against a wide range of pathogens and for the functioning of most if not all vaccines. In order for antibodies to be protective, however, they must satisfy two conditions: First, they must bind to their targets tightly, which is achieved through an extraordinary Darwinian evolutionary process that takes place within ad hoc structures known as germinal centers. Second, they must target the correct antigens and epitopes on a pathogen, especially if neutralization is to be achieved. Work in the Victora Lab has centered on various aspects of how B cells achieve both these goals, establishing the mechanisms by which high affinity B cells are identified and clonally expanded in germinal centers and laying out the principles for how competition between different clones of B cells shapes the clonal diversity and antigenic specificity of individual germinal centers. More recently, we have clarified the cellular mechanisms of “original antigenic sin,” a process by which earlier exposures to an antigen prevent the emergence of subsequent antibody responses to variants of this antigen, limiting the effectiveness of variant vaccines.

Gabriel D. Victora received a master’s degree in immunology from the University of São Paulo in Brazil in 2006 and a Ph.D. in immunology from New York University in 2011; he was also a visiting student at Rockefeller in Michel C. Nussenzweig's lab. From 2012 to 2016, he was a Whitehead Fellow. Victora joined Rockefeller in 2016 and was promoted to associate professor in 2022. 

Victora has received an NIH Director’s Early Independence Award, a SciLifeLab Prize for Young Scientists, a MacArthur Fellowship, an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, and an American Association of Immunologists’ BD Biosciences Investigator Award. He has also been named a Searle Scholar, a Burroughs-Wellcome Investigator in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease, and a Pew-Stewart Scholar for Cancer Research.

FLS lectures will take place in Caspary Auditorium and virtually via Zoom. We recommend virtual participants log out of VPN prior to logging in to Zoom. Please do not share the link or post on social media. This talk will be recorded for the RU community.

Open to

Tri-Institutional