Come along to the first instalment of the TRI Seminar Series for 2024. This first seminar will be on immunology with a focus on 'Curing auto-immune diseases by extending remission'. This session will be chaired by Professor Ranjeny Thomas and will feature presentations by special guest Dr Amy Anderson, Senior Research Associate from Newcastle University (The United Kingdom), as well as TRI based researchers.
Date: Monday 27 May 2024
Time: 11:30am - 1:00pm (Followed by a networking lunch till 1.30pm)
Location: TRI Auditorium or Zoom (Please register for Zoom login details)
Speakers
 Dr Amy Anderson, Senior Research Associate, Newcastle University, The United Kingdom
Biomarkers of drug free remission and flare in rheumatoid arthritis
Amy graduated with a BSc (Hons) in Medical Biochemistry from the University of Birmingham in the UK in 2000. Following this she then obtained her PhD in Immunogenetics from Imperial College London in 2005. Amy is currently a Senior Research Associate in the Musculoskeletal Research Group at Newcastle University. Her area of interest is understanding disease pathogenesis in rheumatoid arthritis for application to both biomarker discovery and the development of novel immunotherapies for tolerance induction. She is involved in numerous clinical studies, including BIO-FLARE which aims to understand the biological factors driving disease flare in rheumatoid arthritis, as well as AuToDeCRA2, a phase II clinical trial using autologous tolerogenic dendritic cells for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis.
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 Gayathri M, PhD Candidate, The University of Queensland
Chemokine receptors as potential biomarkers of T1D progression
Gaya is a 3rd year PhD student from Ranjeny Thomas' lab. Her project aims to investigate circulating islet-specific T cells in T1D patients, to identify potential biomarkers of disease progression.
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 Dr Hanno Nel, Senior Research Officer, The University of Queensland
ASITI-T1D: Design and Development of An Antigen-Specific Immunotherapy for the treatment of Type I Diabetes
Since receiving a PhD at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa in 2007, Hanno’s research career has broadly focused on investigating the mechanisms of immune regulation in autoimmune diseases. Having moved to Australia in 2011, he has been working with Ranjeny Thomas here at TRI where he has been involved in the development of tolerising antigen-specific immunotherapies for the treatment of Rheumatoid Arthritis that resulted in of two Phase I clinical trials. Recently he has been involved in expanding the immunotherapy platform developed in the Thomas lab for use in T1D. This included the establishment of high-dimensional flow cytometry panels with several tetramers for identification, phenotyping and sorting of rare T1D antigen-specific T cells to help identify relevant treatment biomarker for use in an upcoming clinical trial that he will be discussing today.
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