Faculty in the News
Feb 2023
The Case of the Incredibly Long-Lived Mouse Cells
Scientists kept rodents’ immune T cells active four times longer than mice can live — which has huge implications for cancer, vaccination, and aging research. “It’s probably one of the most extraordinary papers in immunology that I’ve seen, easily in the past decade,” said E. John Wherry, PhD, chair of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics, who was not involved in the study. “It tells us that immunity can be incredibly durable, if we understand how to generate it properly.”
Jan 2023
Five things to know about this year’s ‘tripledemic’
Flu season came early this year, RSV reared its ugly head, and now there’s a new SARS-CoV-2 variant circulating. Immunologist E. John Wherry and influenza expert Scott Hensley of the Perelman School of Medicine spoke with Penn Today about what this confluence means for our immune systems, vaccinations, and viral competition.
What Is COVID Actually Doing to Our Immune Systems?
A new idea about how COVID-19 can affect immunity has emerged: that even mild infections routinely cause consequential damage to our bodies’ defenses. However, robust longitudinal data starting prior to the pandemic would show “whether we’ve seen large-scale changes in immune fitness,” said E. John Wherry, PhD, chair of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics, and we just don’t have it. In its absence, “the evidence of a long-term impact on the immune system in fully recovered COVID-19 patients, whether mild or severe, is really pretty thin.”
The race to supercharge cancer-fighting T cells
Advances in genome editing through processes such as CRISPR, and the ability to rewire cells through synthetic biology, have led to increasingly elaborate approaches for modifying and supercharging T cells for therapy. Avery Posey, PhD, an assistant professor of Pharmacology, and Carl June, MD, the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy, explain how new techniques are providing tools to counter some of the limitations of current CAR T cell therapies.