News

Congratulations to professor of Microbiology and Immunology and The Center for Vaccine Biology and Immunology, Minsoo Kim, who has won the 2016 Dolph O. Adams Award. Dr. Kim will be accepting the award at the SLB Annual Meeting in September in Verona Italy!

This annual award is named in honor of the outstanding macrophage researcher Dolph O. Adams, M.D., Ph.D. The award is to recognize excellence of an investigator working in the area of cellular and molecular mechanisms of host defense and inflammation.

Immunotherapy for cancer is an exciting topic, as it involves stimulating a patient’s own immune system to fight the malignancy. Although the concept has been around for 100 years,Wilmot scientists such as Minsoo Kim are making it more relevant today.

Kim is using a process called optogenetics to try to improve the response rates for immunotherapy, which range from about 30 percent to 70 percent. He wants to know why immunotherapy doesn’t work 100 percent of the time.

“It’s like we’re sending T-cells on a spy mission and guiding them throughout the process.”

We are proud to recognize Tara Capece and Brandon Walling, who recently won the AAI Trainee Abstract Award. This award provides travel support to AAI Trainee members (graduate students and postdoctoral fellows) whose first-author abstracts submitted to the AAI annual meeting are selected for oral presentation in Block symposia.

Tara and Brandon are part of Minsoo Kim's lab. The Kim lab focuses on understanding how lymphocytes home to and migrate within tissues, specifically studying the role of integrin LFA-1. Tara studies the function of LFA-1 in T cell activation and differentiation while Brandon's project aims to elucidate the LFA-1 mediated mechanism of chemokine independent migration.

Congratulations again to Tara and Brandon for their exciting science and gift to travel and present in the Block Symposium.