Guest speaker Carolien van de Sandt | Influenza virus-specific CD8+ T cells across the human lifespan: a suboptimal reset for the elderly

Medical priority Immunity & inflammation

Wednesday 9 July Carolien van de Sandt PhD (Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Melbourne, Australia) will give a guest lecture ‘Influenza virus-specific CD8+ T cells across the human lifespan: a suboptimal reset for the elderly’ at Sanquin, Amsterdam.

Host: Jet van den Dijssel

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Abstract
Age is a major factor determining disease severity during seasonal epidemic and pandemic outbreaks, yet the underlying mechanisms are far from clear. CD8+ T cell receptors (TCRs) recognize more conserved influenza proteins, providing broad cross-reactivity and protect against severe disease caused by novel influenza viruses. We showed that the frequency, phenotype and TCR clonal composition of influenza-specific CD8+ T cells change across the human lifespan. Highly functional public TCRs dominated young and adult TCR repertoires, whereas less functional private TCRs dominated elderly TCR repertoires. We continued to investigate the longitudinal changes of influenza-specific CD8+ T cells within adult and elderly individuals of the course of 7-12 years and found that both public and private influenza-specific CD8+ T cell responses are long-lived. However, there are dynamic changes on the clonotype level which eventually results in complete loss of the highly functional public clonotypes. These findings have important implications for current and future influenza vaccine strategies.

Biography
Dr Carolien van de Sandt is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Melbourne at the Peter Doherty Institute. Carolien completed her PhD in 2016 at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, where she investigated the longevity, cross-reactivity and immune evasion strategies of influenza virus-specific CD8+ T cells. In 2018, she was awarded the MSCA Fellowship and McKenzie Fellowship to join the Kedzierska laboratory at the University of Melbourne, where she leads the Aging Immunity Research Program. Her research aims to unravel the mechanisms underlying gain and loss of virus-specific CD8+ T cell function across human lifespan. Carolien joined Sanquin during the pandemic (2020-2021) as part of her MSCA Fellowship, to study SARS-CoV-2 immunity in healthy and autoimmune patients. In 2022 she was awarded the ARC-DECRA Fellowship and the NHMRC Investigator Fellowship in 2025 to continue her Aging Immunity and T cell Development Research at the University of Melbourne. Carolien has >70 publications and her work has been recognized by prestigious Awards including the ESWI Claude Hannoun Prize for Best Body of Work (2023), the Viruses 2022 Early Career Investigator Award (2022) and she received the AIPS-Young Tall Poppy Award (2023) for her contributions to public outreach.