Bioinformatics Seminar
Time: 11AM
Venue: Davis Auditorium and Online
5 August 2025
Identifying aberrant Immune cells in autoimmunity and cancer, lessons from celiac disease and CAR T cells
Fabio LucianiUniversity of New South Wales
Aberrant immune cell populations play critical roles in both autoimmune diseases and cancer, yet their identification and functional characterisation remain challenging. In this seminar, I will present how single-cell multi-omic technologies are transforming our ability to define rare and pathogenic immune subsets in clinical settings. Using celiac disease as a model, I will show how our analyses of duodenal biopsies from patients with refractory celiac disease (RCD) uncovered the presence of CD3-negative lymphoid cells and CD3-positive T cells carrying lymphoma driver mutations. These clonally expanded, mutation-bearing cells display inflammatory and cytotoxic signatures and may underpin chronic inflammation and lymphomagenesis in RCD. I will also highlight insights from CAR T cell therapy, where we use single-cell transcriptomic and proteomic profiling to dissect the molecular features of therapeutic T cells and notably the extreme case where CAR T cells caused T cell lymphoma in the patients. By integrating these two disease contexts, we gain mechanistic understanding of how immune surveillance can be subverted, and how precision analytics can guide both diagnostics and therapy in immune-mediated diseases and cancer.