Workshop “Systems biology of T cells: clinical, experimental and theoretical approaches”

This workshop belong to the series “Current Trends in Biomedicine”, organized by the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía (UNIA).

More information and application at http://www.unia.es/biomedicine

SCOPE:

The immune system can be viewed as a coordinated set of cells and molecules that preserve the integrity of vertebrates’ tissues and physiology. Thus, it defends against health-threatening microorganisms (such as viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites) and tumours. In doing so, the immune system must be able to distinguish between harmful antigens and non- harmful self-antigens, which should be tolerated and/or not damaged. It must also distinguish different pathogens from each other, and sufficiently rapidly to mount an efficient response. These requirements have resulted in a system with many hundreds of different signalling molecules impacting and/or mediating the function of, at least, twenty different immune cell types.

Immunological processes span temporal and spatial scales from handfuls of interacting molecules within a cell to huge populations of proliferating lymphocytes. Thus, a profound physical and mathematical understanding and a range of deterministic and stochastic modelling approaches are required to describe them. Moreover, technical advances are providing ever-more-refined tools with which to probe immune responses and constrain the models. For example, recent advances in two-photon microscopy and cell labelling have made it possible to directly observe cells interacting in vivo, and are opening new perspectives in Immunology by generating a wealth of quantitative data. Theoretical understanding of these interactions and other processes is very much lacking, in some cases, apparently, for deep mathematical reasons. The integration of mathematical and computational models with immunological data poses a challenge that cannot be successfully managed by immunologists, biologists, clinicians, physicists or applied mathematicians on their own. An inter-disciplinary approach is required to provide answers to the current challenges of basic and clinical Immunology.

The workshop is intended to cover cutting edge topics of T lymphocyte physiology, from thymic development and differentiation and T cell repertoire generation to peripheral homeostasis, activation and regulation, both in health and disease. The major focus of the workshop is to promote and stimulate the combination of theoretical approaches, whether mathematical or computational, with clinical and experimental ones. This inter-disciplinary approach has the advantage of providing a novel and quantitative insight to both basic and clinical immunology. The dual aspect of T cell physiology, health and disease, will then be covered from theoretical, clinical and experimental perspectives.

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