By Shannon Huang
Hi! I’m Shannon, and I’m a second year at UC San Diego studying bioengineering with a focus in biotechnology. I’m really interested in T-cell biology, and specifically how we can use their biology to make immunotherapies more effective. This summer, I’ll be going to the Obenauf Lab at the Vienna Biocenter in Austria to study a type of immune condition called T-cell exhaustion and how obesity can affect it.
I first heard about T-cell exhaustion when I started working at the Teijaro Lab at Scripps Research, which focuses on cancer and viral immunology. A recent cancer therapy called checkpoint therapy prevents cancer cells from inactivating T-cells, which allows T-cells to kill cancer cells better. However, this results in T-cells becoming exhausted from overstimulation, leading to less killing activity and eventual cell death. Obviously you don’t want your defense against cancer to start dying out, so we’re looking at ways to prevent that from happening. One way is to make the T-cells “feel” less exhausted by looking at their genes. In my lab, I was involved in research looking at genetic changes in T-cell exhaustion, where I knocked out genes that were expressed more in exhausted cells to see if they would kill better. It was pretty cool, especially when it worked!
As for obesity, the first time I heard about the link between obesity and the immune system was during my interview for the Vienna Biocenter. Because of the high level of inflammation present in obesity, it can lead to T-cell exhaustion and affect how immunotherapies behave. You would think that it might’ve been mentioned as rationale for a project my lab worked on or as a part of the background or further directions of a paper I’ve read, but my first introduction to this was from an Austrian graduate student. She even brought up the fact that rates of obesity in the US are increasing, which could pose a huge problem for treating chronic infections and cancer. If something so relevant to the US was something I’ve never heard of, are there other research areas in immunology that are underresearched because they’re considered normal?
I hope I’ll have answers to this question by the time this fellowship ends. I think working in a different lab, especially one in a different country, would really help me broaden my horizons of what are considered “beneficial” research questions, especially those that aren’t heavily discussed in the US. Learning to adapt to different environments and incorporating the best parts of different methods would also help me become a more informed researcher once I come back. Interactions with fellows both from the Tyler Center and the Vienna Biocenter would help me gain a more global perspective on research and how different cultural backgrounds inform it. And of course, exploring the city and everything it has to offer would be a great way to spend my weekends! I’m not looking forward to packing my bags and hopping on planes so soon, but I can already tell this is a summer I won’t regret.
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