Immunology Researchers share their Spatial Discoveries in SARS-CoV-2 host response and in multiple sclerosis

 

Doug will be the chair of this session and will introduce the winners of the 2020 British Society for Immunology, NanoString and Illumina Spatial Biology Grant. Doug will also moderate a short panel discussion on the use of Spatial Biology for Immunology research.

 

The corona virus SARS-CoV 2 has led to a worldwide pandemic.Infected people may develop neurologic dysfunctions with sometimes functional impairment of the respiratory center in the brainstem.

We investigated in patients deceased from COVID-19 whether direct neuro-invasion of the brainstem by SARS-CoV 2 led to the proposed dysfunction. Our preliminary data point to a putative SARS-CoV 2 dependent dysfunction of the endothelial cells of the blood-brain-barrier (BBB), leading to loss of proper function and potential access of immune cells to the brain. We investigated expression profiles of selected brain endothelial cells with and without adjacent immune infiltrations in the brain of people deceased from COVID-19 to help define molecular mechanisms and identify key proteins involved in the execution of brain vessel dysfunction in severe and fatal COVID-19 cases.

 

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a chronic, inflammatory, demyelinating disease of the central nervous system (CNS) that strikes young adults in the prime of their lives.

A hallmark of the progressive phase of MS is the accumulating neurodegeneration and cortical demyelinating pathology. Extensive immune infiltrates can exist as simple lymphoid aggregates or more organised assemblages termed tertiary lymphoid structures (TLS). The relative grade of meningeal lymphoid aggregates correlates with the severity of clinical disease (Bevan et al., 2018).

The study investigates the characterization of the immune cell composition of TLS in MS and the cellular alterations they incur in the cortex by carrying out the GeoMx Whole Transcriptome Atlas analysis of TLS and their effects on underlying neurons in rare post-mortem MS samples

 

Learning Objectives

 

For Research Use Only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures