Our long-term goal is to probe theoretically and experimentally how reliable immune responses emerge at the system level from the unreliable responses of individual T cells. Our first project aims at probing how heterogeneity in the expression levels of key signaling proteins generates phenotypic variability in T cells'responsiveness to ligands. We will also probe how such stochasticity of signaling responses translates into functional phenotypic variability.
Our second aim tests how multiplexed signals (e.g. T cell ligands and IL15 cytokine) can activate signaling crosstalks that modulate the levels and/or activity of key signaling proteins and make T cells hyperresponsive to self-derived ligands.
Our third aim probes how cytokine regulation integrates cell variability in antigen response at the individual cell level towards a regulated collective response. This project focuses on Interleukin-2 as a critical cytokine that controls quorum sensing among effector T cells and suppression by regulatory T cells. Our approach is fundamentally interdisciplinary with concomitant computational modeling and experimental testing. It consists in making and validating theoretical predictions to quantify and control how immune responses emerge as dynamically- and collectively-regulated properties of individual T cells.

Public Health Relevance

Our project focuses on developing experimentally-validated computer models of T cell activation. Our goal is to identify how reliable immune responses emerge dynamically from the unreliable activation of individual T cells. The long-term impact of our research is in a better control of immune responses towards immunotherapies for cancer and auto- immune disorders.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
1R01AI083408-01
Application #
7697433
Study Section
Modeling and Analysis of Biological Systems Study Section (MABS)
Program Officer
Gondre-Lewis, Timothy A
Project Start
2009-08-05
Project End
2013-07-31
Budget Start
2009-08-05
Budget End
2010-07-31
Support Year
1
Fiscal Year
2009
Total Cost
$474,859
Indirect Cost
Name
Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research
Department
Type
DUNS #
064931884
City
New York
State
NY
Country
United States
Zip Code
10065
Oyler-Yaniv, Alon; Oyler-Yaniv, Jennifer; Whitlock, Benjamin M et al. (2017) A Tunable Diffusion-Consumption Mechanism of Cytokine Propagation Enables Plasticity in Cell-to-Cell Communication in the Immune System. Immunity 46:609-620
Malandro, Nicole; Budhu, Sadna; Kuhn, Nicholas F et al. (2016) Clonal Abundance of Tumor-Specific CD4(+) T Cells Potentiates Efficacy and Alters Susceptibility to Exhaustion. Immunity 44:179-193
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Chen, Ying-Han; Du, WenLi; Hagemeijer, Marne C et al. (2015) Phosphatidylserine vesicles enable efficient en bloc transmission of enteroviruses. Cell 160:619-630
Voisinne, Guillaume; Nixon, Briana G; Melbinger, Anna et al. (2015) T Cells Integrate Local and Global Cues to Discriminate between Structurally Similar Antigens. Cell Rep 11:1208-19
Tkach, Karen E; Barik, Debashis; Voisinne, Guillaume et al. (2014) T cells translate individual, quantal activation into collective, analog cytokine responses via time-integrated feedbacks. Elife 3:e01944
Palomba, M Lia; Piersanti, Kelly; Ziegler, Carly G K et al. (2014) Multidimensional single-cell analysis of BCR signaling reveals proximal activation defect as a hallmark of chronic lymphocytic leukemia B cells. PLoS One 9:e79987
Tkach, Karen E; Oyler, Jennifer E; Altan-Bonnet, Grégoire (2014) Cracking the NF-?B code. Sci Signal 7:pe5
Cotari, Jesse W; Voisinne, Guillaume; Altan-Bonnet, Grégoire (2013) Diversity training for signal transduction: leveraging cell-to-cell variability to dissect cellular signaling, differentiation and death. Curr Opin Biotechnol 24:760-6
Tkach, Karen; Altan-Bonnet, Gregoire (2013) T cell responses to antigen: hasty proposals resolved through long engagements. Curr Opin Immunol 25:120-5

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