Time: Thursday 16 July 2020 from 19:00 for 19:30

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this event will be delivered online. More details can be found here.

TITLE: The Immune System: From Basic Knowledge to Novel Anti-tumour Treatments

Our immune system is essential for our survival. It constantly battles pathogens, without us even realising it. To efficiently tackles all types of invaders we encounter, the immune system is composed of multiple cell types, which have to coordinate their actions to avoid spreading of the invading pathogen. During the first part of this talk, I will present the complex journey the different players of the immune system take to ascertain they keep our body healthy. In the second part of the talk, I will move on to situations where the immune system is not working appropriately, focusing on the immune response to cancer. Finally, I will present examples on how we can harness the immune system and train it to control cancer.

Speaker: Audrey Gerard

Audrey Gerard is a group leader at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, University of Oxford. Audrey has been trained as an immunologist in France, and worked in the Netherlands and the US before starting her group in the UK. Her group is interested in understanding how immune cells communicate and how these communication channels are co-opted during carcinogenesis to evade the immune system.