Pooja Jain
Drexel College of Medicine, USA
Title: Neuro-immune cross talk and dendritic cells based immunotherapies for neurological diseases
Biography
Biography: Pooja Jain
Abstract
For last several years, our laboratory has placed tremendous efforts in understanding retroviral pathogenesis both in periphery and in CNS utilizing human T-cell leukemia virus (HTLV) as a model pathogen with prime focus on dendritic cells (DCs). HTLV-1 is not only a good model for human chronic viral infection but also of associated neurological complications. Therefore, through these studies we were able to provide new scientific insights and paradigms in the areas of neuroimmunology and neurovirology. Our long-standing research work with HTLV-1 helped in bridging two important fields of Neuroscience and Immunology while strengthening DCs’ presence and functions within CNS. This is by means of our original work providing direct evidence for the ability of circulating DCs to migrate across the inflamed blood-brain barrier during an active ongoing neuroinflammatory condition such as experimental autoimmune encephalitis (EAE) by live intravital video microscopy. This was further substantiated by a variety of non-invasive imaging tools such as NIR, SPECT-CT, MRI, PET, etc. These studies have identified lectins (i.e., CLEC12A) as key molecular targets for potentially new DC-based immunotherapeutic strategies against neuroinflammatory diseases such as MS. Fairly recently; we undertook similar approach toward HIV-1 CNS infection to investigate if follicular DCs (fDCs) within deep cerebral lymph nodes (CLNs) could be potential reservoir for HIV/SIV CNS infection. We are also interested in investigating novel means to inhibit HIV-fDC interactions as relate to the CNS pathogenesis. Taken together, our work on DC-CNS trafficking has helped changed the central dogma of CNS being the immune privileged site.