Friday, July 31, 2020

Drs. Elizabeth Mann and Madhvi Menon (Univ of Manchester): Longitudinal immune profiling reveals distinct features of COVID-19 pathogenesis

10:00 AM to 11:00 AM
Elizabeth Mann and Madhvi Menon will discuss findings from their recent longitudinal immune profiling study with admitted COVID-19 patients across four hospitals in Manchester at the height of the pandemic in the UK. They find key immune signatures that track with disease severity and can potentially be used to identify patients upon admission that are destined for intensive care. They also determine how immune responses change throughout the disease course and how this differs in patients with milder disease that recover compared with patients who go on to become severe/critical.
 

PRESENTERS

Elizabeth Mann obtained her PhD from Imperial College London in 2010 studying tissue specificity of human dendritic cells in the laboratory of Professor Stella Knight. Her postdoctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (with Dr Xuhang Li) and the University of Glasgow (with Professor Simon Milling) investigated mechanisms by which intestinal immune responses are dysregulated in inflammatory bowel disease, and how gut immunity is shaped by local factors including the gut microbiota. Elizabeth Mann established her own research group in 2017 through a Wellcome Trust and Royal Society-funded Henry Dale Fellowship at the University of Manchester, and she is currently investigating how mucosal immune responses are regulated by the local environment in the intestine, the lungs and the reproductive tract. 
Madhvi Menon is a Presidential Research Fellow at the University of Manchester investigating mechanisms of B cell dysfunction in chronic inflammatory disorders. Prior to this, she completed her postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School, identifying inflammatory pathways contributing to age-related macular degeneration, and at University College London, investigating how gut pathology contributes to the pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis. She obtained her PhD in Immunology from University College London in 2015 studying the crosstalk between B cells and plasmacytoid dendritic cells in systemic lupus erythematosus.

 

MODERATOR

The webinar will be moderated by Ann Ager, Professor at the Division of Infection and Immunity, Cardiff University, UK.Ann gained a PhD from Cambridge University studying inflammatory responses in vascular endothelial cells. After training in microvascular biology with Professor Judah Folkman in Boston, she began her life-long interests in high endothelial venule (HEV) blood vessels and T-cell trafficking as a postdoctoral fellow with Professor Bill Ford at the University of Manchester. Ann gained an MRC Senior Fellowship before moving to a PI position at the MRC National Institute for Medical Research in London where she began working on L-selectin/CD62L. Ann moved to Cardiff University as Reader and then Professor where her research has focussed on T-cell trafficking in virus infection, cancer and, more recently, in Alzheimer’s disease.