Latest News

Sunday September 01, 2024

Congratulations to Adrian Ilich
2023 ASI Career Advancement Awardee

We warmly congratulate
Adrian Ilich
winner of the 2023 ASI Career Advancement Award

--
 

My name is Adrian, and I am a third year PhD student based at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute. I completed my undergraduate degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Queensland before starting an MPhil in A/Prof Severine Navarro’s Mucosal Immunology Lab. After a year of study, I was nominated and successfully articulated my MPhil degree into a PhD as I had shown work above the standard and scope of an MPhil.

I have always found the molecular processes and mechanisms that drive immune dysregulation extremely interesting. I was particularly interested in studying allergy as I have struggled with anaphylaxis as a child and even now, although not as severe, I still have food and pollen allergies. I have had to use an EpiPen and be resuscitated by paramedics several times, which was incredibly traumatic for both myself and my parents. I think this really drove me to dedicate my career towards developing better treatments. This is why I wanted to work with A/Prof Navarro as her lab aims to develop novel immunotherapies to prevent the onset of atopy in early life.

The main immune function that is impaired in allergic individuals is the ability to tolerate innocuous allergens. One of the important players in mediating immune tolerance in mucosal tissues are regulatory T cells (Tregs). Severine’s lab has previously discovered that tolerance could be enhanced after exposure to dietary, microbial and even parasite-derived antigens. Enhancing tolerance through these exposures was found to be even more effective when the intervention was administered in early life. However, it is unclear whether these different antigens use similar tolerogenic pathways, and it is uncertain whether the Tregs induced from each of these distinct antigens are similar in phenotype and function.

My project focuses on determining the transcriptional profile and epigenetic modifications of the key cellular players in tolerance and the VDJ rearrangement on the Tregs following exposure to dietary antigens or a parasite-derived protein. To do this, I have done single cell RNA sequencing with VDJ rearrangements on CD4 T cells and single nuclei RNA/ATAC sequencing of other immune cells. With this data I will be able to compare two different types antigens (worm derived product and microbiome derived product) that act on the adaptive immune system in mucosal sites to achieve similar pro-tolerogenic effects. Shotgun quantitative meta-proteomics was also done on the microbiome proteins extracted from the faecal samples to identify the potential tolerogenic antigens involved in the induction and maintenance of tolerance originating in the gut. By better understanding how tolerance education occurs, we may be able to modulate regulatory T cell populations throughout the whole body and in a vast array of disease contexts.

After my PhD, I aim to do a postdoctoral fellowship in bioinformatics to further my training on single cell data analysis and potentially expand to other techniques such as proteomics, bulk sequencing and spatial transcriptomics. As a large part of my PhD focuses on single cell analyses I already have the opportunity to develop a portfolio which includes data generated from multiple kinds of single cell sequencing techniques. This area is growing rapidly and has great power to decipher molecular mechanisms that previously have not been able to be studied. I am grateful to be entering this field at such an exciting time where I can use these tools to decipher new pathways, mechanisms of action, and cells interactions that haven’t previously been understood.

This award (Post Graduate Career Advancement Award) will be used to purchase a powerful computer on which I will be able to run the bioinformatic pipelines necessary for analysing the single cell data I have collected for my PhD. I am currently using an underpowered and very old PC that is limiting the speed and ability of my analysis. This new PC will allow me to run the analysis pipelines I have been working on for the past year on the single cell sequencing data we have now collected and hopefully lead to exciting discoveries about tolerance education in early life.

Author: Adrian Ilich

Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the author/s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of ASI