Dr. Julie Magarian Blander - Harnessing innate immunity and inflammasome in vaccines and cancer therapy - Fernand Gallais Conference Room

Julie Magarian Blander

Weill Cornell Medicine, Jill Roberts Institute for Research in Inflammatory Bowel disease, New-York, USA

Harnessing innate immunity and inflammasome in vaccines and cancer therapy

Dr. Julie Blander, Gladys and Roland Harriman Professor of Immunology, investigates the fundamental principles of innate immunity and inflammation, and their application to human disease. Her research focuses on the function of phagocytes in infection, cancer, and chronic inflammation.
Dr. Blander received her PhD on tumor immunology, with Olivera Finn as her advisor, at Pittsburgh University. She conducted her post-doctoral training in the Section of Immunobiology at Yale University working on Toll-like receptors and innate immunity under the guidance of her mentors Dr. Charles Janeway and Dr. Ruslan Medzhitov. The Blander lab was established in 2006 with the appointment of Dr. Blander as Assistant Professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Dr. Blander was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2011, and moved her lab in November 2016 to the Weill Cornell Medical College-Cornell University where she was appointed as an endowed full professor with tenure. She was recipient of many awards including, recently, Sanofi Innovation Award in 2019, Weill Cornell Medicine COVID-19 Research Grant in 2020, Jeanne and Herbert Siegel Award for Outstanding Medical Research in 2021, and the 2022 European Macrophage and Dendritic Cell Society Outstanding Scientific Achievements Award.

Selected references

• Blander JM. 2023. Different routes of MHC-I delivery to phagosomes and their consequences to CD8 T cell immunity. Semin Immunol 66:101713
• Moretti J, Jia B, Hutchins Z, Roy S, Yip H, Wu J, Shan M, Jaffrey SR, Coers J, Blander JM. 2022. Caspase-11 interaction with NLRP3 potentiates the noncanonical activation of the NLRP3 inflammasome. Nat Immunol 23:705
• Barbet G, Nair-Gupta P, Schotsaert M, Yeung ST, Moretti J, Seyffer F, Metreveli G, Gardner T, Choi A, Tortorella D, Tampé R, Khanna KM, García-Sastre A, Blander JM. 2021. TAP dysfunction in dendritic cells enables noncanonical cross-presentation for T cell priming. Nat Immunol 22:497
• Barbet G, Sander LE, Geswell M, Leonardi I, Cerutti A, Iliev I, Blander JM. 2018. Sensing Microbial Viability through Bacterial RNA Augments T Follicular Helper Cell and Antibody Responses. Immunity 48:584
• Moretti J, Roy S, Bozec D, Martinez J, Chapman JR, Ueberheide B, Lamming DW, Chen ZJ, Horng T, Yeretssian G, Green DR, Blander JM. 2017. STING Senses Microbial Viability to Orchestrate Stress-Mediated Autophagy of the Endoplasmic Reticulum. Cell 171:809.