Hepatitis B virus remains a major medical burden with more than 250 million chronically infected patients worldwide and 900,000 deaths each year, due to the disease progression towards severe complications (cirrhosis, hepatocellular carcinoma). Despite the ...
Cell-cell communication is fundamental for immune balance. Multivalent interactions of surface receptors at immune interfaces drive specific communication, with stimulatory and inhibitory signals guiding the immune outcome. Notably, the valency, affinity, ...
Viruses initiate invasion by binding to cell surface glycoproteins. Materials mimicking the carbohydrate motifs of these glycoproteins, such as heparan sulfate (HS) and sialic acid (SA) can block viral attachment and inhibit the infection. Multivalent disp ...
Chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) are synthetic, transmembrane proteins that trigger immune cell signaling following their engagement. They have been first utilized in T cells and later in natural killer (NK) cells to redirect their cytotoxicity toward a s ...
Implanted brain electrodes provide a unique way of electrically interfacing with individual neurons in vivo. However, chronic recording or stimulating capabilities of neural implants are often impaired by a strong immune response resulting in a fibrous sca ...
CD4+T cells orchestrate the adaptive immune response against pathogens and cancer by recognizing epitopes presented on class II major histocompatibility complex (MHC-II) molecules. The high polymorphism of MHC-II genes represents an important hurdle toward ...
The NLRP3 inflammasome is a central component of the innate immune system. Its activation leads to for-mation of the ASC speck, a supramolecular assembly of the inflammasome adaptor protein ASC. Different models, based on ASC overexpression, have been prop ...
Cancer immunotherapy has become an attractive strategy among different therapeutic modalities over the past few years and has showed great success in the clinic. However, there are many outstanding challenges hindering the current immunotherapies. In my Ph ...
Hosts and pathogens are involved in a long-standing evolutionary arms race characterized by successive rounds of evolution. Specifically, while hosts evolve resistance against infections, pathogens adapt to re-establish virulence. Since the signatures of t ...
Cancer immunotherapy is the science of boosting the immune response of patients to fight cancer. Recent advances have brought up treatments with huge success in the clinic. Patients with ad-vanced-stage cancers were long-term cured through checkpoint inhib ...
Adipose tissue is a key metabolic and highly-dynamic organ whose dysregulation may cause clinical conditions of concern such as obesity and lipodystrophy. Its function varies based on the anatomy, in fact, visceral adipose tissue expansion carries a greate ...
