Virginia Pascual, Director, Drukier Institute (WCM)

I would like to project that is developing as the result of the "Immunology in Health and Disease Symposium” that took place in Ithaca in June 2018. I met Ankur Singh at that time and was very impressed with his “on chip” lymph node approach as a tool to understand many aspects of the regulation of antibody responses. As you know, my group has been involved in the characterization of human follicular, and more recently extra-follicular, T cell helper cells in the context of systemic autoimmune diseases. With Ankur’s help, we could think of modeling these responses in vitro using cells from patients and controls. This would be a great step towards understanding basic disease mechanisms. Since June, we have had several exchanges and I found Ankur very engaged and excited with the possibility of collaborating. Having an RFA in place to foster these collaborations is a great incentive to pursue this further.

Thank you so much for all your help in fostering these interactions. It is being great fun to meet the scientific community in Ithaca and I very much look forward to working with them.