MIEP team attends Modeling Immunity for Biodefense symposium

BLACKSBURG, Va., July 11, 2012 – Modeling Immunity to Enteric Pathogens (MIEP) team members recently attended the 2012 Symposium on Modeling Immune Responses from Complex Data. The symposium was held at the Center for Biodefense Immune Modeling at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry in Rochester, NY. This center, along with MIEP and two others, form the Modeling Immunity for Biodefense program funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Josep Bassaganya-Riera, Ph.D., the Center Director and a Professor of Immunology at Virginia Tech, gave an invited talk about MIEP’s work. About the symposium, he said: “Modeling gives us a valuable tool for understanding the mechanisms of action underlying immune responses to enteric pathogens. It leads us to new hypotheses, targets our lab work more effectively and is helping us to discover and develop novel immunotherapeutics. We have made great progress, and it is exciting to share it with others.”

Events such as this symposium provide researchers a vital opportunity to exchange research ideas on computational immunology.

A multi-day summer school held immediately preceding the event also offered fifty students, post-docs, and other researchers a hands-on introduction to methods, technologies, and best practices for modeling immunological processes. Adria Carbo, a PhD student in theNutritional Immunology and Molecular Medicine Laboratory (NIMML) at VBI, won first place for a poster entitled “Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor g activation drives Th17 cells into a Treg phenotype” highlighting his work with the MIEP team.

MIEP will host its own summer school and symposium on modeling immunity at Virginia Tech in June 2014.

Please visit the MIEP Web Portal at www.modelingimmunity.org.

MIEP is funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the NIH, under Contract No. HHSN272201000056C to VBI. PI: Josep Bassaganya-Riera.

About NIMML

The NIMML Institute is a 501 (c) (3) non-profit public charity foundation focused on a transdisciplinary, team-science approach to precision medicine at the interface of immunology, inflammation, and metabolism. The NIMML Institute team has led numerous large-scale transdisciplinary projects and is dedicated to solving important societal problems by combining the expertise of immunologists, computational biologists, toxicologists, modelers, translational researchers, and molecular biologists. The Institute is headquartered in Blacksburg, VA. For more information, please visit www.nimml.org or contact [email protected].