My name is Dirk Brenner and I am a group leader at the Luxembourg Institute of Health
We are working on cellular communication within the immune system
Our aim is to explore new pathways for the treatment of inflammatory diseases
I got attracted by the FNR ATTRACT Fellowship,
and this is how we founded the group and got started.
Inflammatory diseases are actually quite heterogeneous group of diseases,
including multiple sclerosis, arthritis, diabetes, but also cancer.
All these diseases have in common that the immune system is deregulated
and is either causing these diseases or supporting these diseases.
In our lab, we are interested in analysing signalling networks in cells
We first take our protein samples, which is basically like a ‘cell soup’
and analyse these proteins by using a so-called gel to separate them by size
We can detect these by fluorescent coupled antibodies,
which can be visualised in the specific chamber here.
It’s basically like general photography:
Depending on the picture we get,
we see whether a cell is active in the one or other pathway,
or whether it’s inactive.
In some disease cases, certain proteins are even totally lacking,
and that alone might be the cause of the disease.
In another laboratory, we are using flow cytometry
Flow cytometry is a very powerful technique that gives us an idea
about the surface characteristics of several immune cells,
We are basically shooting cells through a very complicated machine
where we can detect surface molecules by fluorescence labelling,
and depending on the combination and the intensity of the different fluorescent signals,
we can make assumptions about the activation status of these cells
and the activation status of a cell
tells you basically how good potential immune cells might be in an anti-tumour attack
In the lab where we study infections,
all the scientists are dressed up in protective clothes
So here we have isolated, for example, virus-specific T-cells
and we plate them together in an antigen-specific context
to measure a specific viral response.
This sounds quite complicated, however, we just put the cells in to this test plate,
place them in the incubator and after 24 hours and 48 hours,
we see that the T-cells that react to the virus have been dividing
and this can also be visualised, for example by flow cytometry
If you take a drug today, you mainly have an inhibitor in your hands,
and an inhibitor is something that blocks cellular communication
That’s why it is so important to understand this cellular communication pathway,
because it is gives us a disease mechanism
and that is important to also then interfere with the disease itself
In the end we are going to prove our concepts in a functional immune system in mice,
if the results are promising and we can confirm it,
then this is the first step for further pre-clinical development of a potential drug
The ultimate aim would be to have a certain panel of immunotherapeutics that are directed against the same disease,
to have a certain flexibility and also to respond to the individual needs of the patients
and we would like to have a significant part in this development.
