Systems Serology Core

CORE 1 – SYSTEMS SEROLOGY CORE – ABSTRACT
Accumulating data points to dramatic immunologic changes during pregnancy and early life. However, how these
immune perturbations alter the immune response to vaccination or to infection have yet to be fully defined. Under
Core 1, in depth comprehensive characterization will be performed on the humoral immune response to improve
our understanding of the mechanisms by which the immune system changes throughout pregnancy, how these
changes affect responses to vaccines and how infants benefit from maternal immunity and in turn respond to
vaccines. Specifically, Core 1 will exploit and evolve Systems Serology to broadly and deeply probe the nature
of the humoral immune response in a sample sparing manner, via the development of multiplexed-antibody
profiling approaches. Additionally Core 1 will develop lower-throughput functional assays to probe the interaction
between antibodies and host-innate immune cells, in a fully autologous fashion, to define the overall impact of
altered antibody and cellular state in pregnancy and early life. Thus Core 1 will deeply interrogate and define
changes in humoral immunity throughout pregnancy, at birth, and throughout early infant life. The Core leader
will provide all the expertise, infrastructure, reagents, personnel, and training, to ensure the efficient and
successful analysis and deployment of this technology under Projects 1 & 2, as well as support in generating
data for Projects 2 & 4. Thus the main role of this Core is to provide the leadership and the technical expertise
to ensure that antibody assays are run in a standard fashion, that novel technologies evolve from this Core to
support the needs of the overall Consortium, and that the Consortium is kept abreast of the latest developments
in assessing antibody responses.

Grant Number: 5U19AI145825-05
NIH Institute/Center: NIH
Principal Investigator: Galit Alter