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2022 Science Writing Competition winners announced!

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Congratulations to our winners!

To make science accessible, clear, concise communication is essential. The Antibody Society thus offers our student and post-doctoral fellow members a chance to grow this skill through a Science Writing Competition. Entrants submitted essays of 1200 – 1500 words on a topic related to antibody research that were evaluated by our panel of judges.

Our post-doc and student winners are:

Dr. Finn Wolfreys, University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA

Essay title: Antibody Discovery’s Diversity Problem

Alexander Brown, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Aurora, CO, USA

Essay title: Immunity in a Deck of Cards

The winning essays can be accessed via the links above.

View all winning essays from the
Science Writing Competitions here

The  next Science Writing Competition opens in Feb. 2023.

Thanks to everyone who participated!

Join us on May 26 for our next webinar!

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Understanding memory B cell responses induced by heterologous SARS-CoV-2 exposure

Thursday May 26, 2022 11am ET / 5pm CET

Speaker: Laura M. Walker, PhD

Senior Director of Antibody Sciences at Adimab and Chief Scientific Officer and a co-founder of Adagio Therapeutics.

Understanding immune responses following severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) breakthrough infection will facilitate the development of next-generation vaccines. Towards this end, Dr. Walker and her colleagues profiled spike (S)-specific B cell responses following Omicron/BA.1 infection in mRNA-vaccinated donors. The acute antibody response was characterized by high levels of somatic hypermutation and a bias toward recognition of ancestral SARS-CoV-2 strains, suggesting the early activation of vaccine-induced memory B cells. BA.1 breakthrough infection induced a shift in B cell immunodominance hierarchy from the S2 subunit toward the receptor binding domain (RBD). A large proportion of RBD-directed neutralizing antibodies isolated from BA.1 breakthrough infection donors displayed convergent sequence features and broadly recognized SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern. Dr. Walker will discuss these findings, which provide insights into the role of pre-existing immunity in shaping the B cell response to heterologous SARS-CoV-2 variant exposure.

Registration is open!

Join us for “Fundamentals of the Immune System”, Parts I & II

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Part I:  Organization of the immune system.
Thursday June 3, 2021, 11am – 1pm ET. 

Part II:  The immune system in action.
Tuesday June 15, 2021, 11am – 1pm ET.

In this 2-part workshop on the fundamentals of the immune system, Dr. Jamie Scott, Professor Emerita, Simon Fraser University, Canada, will first provide an overview of humoral and cellular immunity, and the basic structure of the immune system, including its cells, tissues and compartments, along with the “superhighway” of the immune system: the circulatory and lymphatic systems. In that context, innate and adaptive immune systems and their interaction, and the general timing and dynamics of immune responses will be presented.

The processes of lymphocyte development, including the various B- and T-cell subsets, positive and negative selection, and the genetic basis of B-cell and T-cell receptor diversification, will be presented to provide a clear idea of what adaptive-immune receptor repertoires (AIRRs) are, and in general terms, how they are currently assessed via high-throughput sequencing. Dr. Scott will then cover the signaling, activation, proliferation and differentiation of T-cell and B-cell clones in the context of lymphoid compartments where antigen is concentrated and presented to naïve and memory B and T cells. The role of co-stimulation in determining the type immune response generated will be emphasized.

In Part II, Dr. Scott will review the orchestration of systemic and mucosal immune responses, including the roles of tolerance and inflammation in these processes. Examples of immune responses to vaccines, chronic viral infection, and/or cancer, as well as autoimmunity, will be presented as variations on a common theme, reiterating the dynamics of the immune response. Some engineered immunotherapies, such as therapeutic antibodies, CAR-T cells and dendritic-cell vaccines, will be introduced as well.

The importance of AIRR-sequencing data to our understanding of immune responses will be emphasized throughout the latter half of this workshop.

Click here to register for Part I

Click here to register for Part II