School of Medicine

The BSI Summer School 2011 began with the meeting’s keynote lecture delivered by Peter Parham (Stanford, USA) who gave a personal and fascinating view on “Ghosts from the Past”.

The second day was devoted to “Killing Bugs” with excellent overviews given by Ken Murphy (St. Louis, USA), Peter Parham (Stanford, USA), Bernhard Moser (Cardiff, UK) and Andrew McMichael (Oxford, UK) into innate and adaptive immune responses and their relevance to infections.  The topics in this session ranged from the role of pathogen recognition receptors and natural killer cell receptors and the importance of chemokines in orchestrating immune cell trafficking to the plasticity of T cell responses and the challenges underlying the development of successful vaccines against pathogens such as HIV.

The basic knowledge gained from this session was then put into the context of autoimmunity on the next day with its focus on “Killing Self”, when Graham Anderson (Birmingham, UK), Anne Cooke (Cambridge, UK), Ludvig Sollid (Oslo, Norway) and David Wraith (Bristol, UK) explained the mechanisms behind central and peripheral tolerance and how, when dysregulated, they give rise to autoimmune disorders, but also where hopes are for possible avenues to treat diseases such as diabetes, coeliac disease and multiple sclerosis.

The fourth and last day of the meeting explored the role of the immune system in “Killing Tumours”, with talks by Geraint Williams (Cardiff, UK), Adrian Hayday (London, UK) and Kees Melief (Leiden, The Netherlands) describing the histopathological evidence of tumour killing by tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes, the role of unconventional T cells in stress surveillance and novel approaches for boosting the immune system and developing vaccines against cancer.

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^{The BSI Summer School 2011 was organised by Cardiff University-based i3-IRG researchers Awen Gallimore, Andrew Godkin, Matthias Eberl and James Matthews.}

More impressions from the meeting can be found here.

A full meeting report as published in the 'BSI Immunology News' (August 2011 issue) can be downloaded as pdf.