SCIENCE AT THE SHINE DOME canberra 3 - 5 may 2006

New Fellows Seminar

Wednesday, 3 May 2006

Professor Jonathan Sprent FRS
Professor, Garvan Institute of Medical Research, Sydney

Jonathan Sprent was born in England and grew up in Brisbane where he went through medical school at The University of Queensland before obtaining a PhD from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne in 1972. After post-doctoral training in Switzerland and England, he worked for 30 years in the USA at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and then The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, before returning to Australia in 2005 supported by a Burnet Award. He is currently Professor at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney. Jonathan works on T cells and has special interests in immunological memory and tolerance, transplantation immunity and cancer immunotherapy.

Boosting cytokine function with antibodies

By binding to cell-surface molecules or cytokines, monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) can be used clinically as powerful antagonists. In certain situations, however, mAbs can have the opposite effect and act as agonists. For T cells and the cytokine interleukin 2 (IL-2), anti-IL-2 mAbs can inhibit some T cells but stimulate others. For the latter, stimulation of T cells is mediated by IL-2/Il-2 mAb immune complexes and also applies to a number of other cytokine/cytokine mAb complexes. Injecting these immune complexes can be used for cancer immunotherapy and also to expand T cells after bone marrow transplantation.