Materials Science and Engineering Spring 2020 Seminar Series: Scott Wilson

Description

Scott Wilson, who became an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University in 2020, will give a talk entitled "Glycopolymer-based Strategies for Engineering Immunity and Tolerance" for the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

Abstract:

Since Edward Jenner first used puss from a milkmaid's cowpox lesions to inoculate children against smallpox in the late 1700s, scientist have sought to develop safe and effective antigen-specific immunotherapies (ASIs) that bias the adaptive immune response towards immunity (i.e., vaccines), and, more recently, tolerance (i.e., inverse vaccines). While considerable progress has been made in the development of vaccines that muster antibody-mediated immunity, the clinical success of other ASIs, such as subunit vaccines that elicit T cell-mediated immunity and inverse vaccines capable of curing autoimmunity, have yet to match their pre-clinical promise. Here, I will introduce approaches that utilized synthetic polymeric glycosylations to target antigens and immunostimulatory adjuvants to specific subsets of antigen presenting cells for the induction of antigen-specific immunity or tolerance. In the context of immunity, I will present a polymeric glycol-adjuvant that when conjugated to a malaria-specific protein induces a more robust antibody- and T cell-mediated immune response than malaria-specific protein formulated with the adjuvant used in the most clinical advanced malaria vaccine. In addition, I will highlight the development of another class of synthetic glycopolymers that, by targeting autoantigens to the liver's immunosuppressive microenvironment, elicit durable autoantigen-specific immunological tolerance marked by auto-reactive T cell anergy and functional regulatory T cells. In concert, these antigen-glycopolymer conjugate platforms represent promising clinically-viable treatments for a variety of complex infections and autoimmune disorders.