Hosted by Cardiff University's School of Medicine

Abstract: Liver-derived and serum-circulating complement is undeniably quintessential for innate immunity by detecting and eliminating infectious microorganisms. However, unexpectedly, cell-autonomous complement expression and its intracellular activities emerged recently as fundamental driver of normal cell metabolism and physiology. In consequence, perturbations in intracellular complement – coined the complosome – are associated with a range of human diseases. This seminar will provide an update on our current knowledge about complosome activities and its regulation in health and disease with focus on the control of T cell biology.

Biography: Prof. Kemper is a Senior Investigator and Section Chief at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland.

After her Ph.D. at the Bernhard-Nocht-Institute for Tropical Medicine, in Germany, and a postdocoral fellowship at Washington University (Saint Louis), she moved to King’s College London, where her group showed that complosome (the intracellular complement system) perturbations are associated with a range of human diseases, including primary immune deficiency, and arthritic and cardiovascular disease. She is the recipient of a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award, the Merit Award for Excellence in Science from the International Complement Society, two Orloff Awards in Science from the NHLBI/NIH, is an elected member of the Henry Kunkel Society, serves on the Scientific Board of Apellis, Inc., and the sitting President of the International Complement Society.

The central goal of her research programme is to define the functional roles and regulative mechanisms of intracellular/autocrine complement and assess their biological relevance. Recently, her lab has broadened its interest heavily towards the role of the complosome in meningeal immunity and neurodegenerative disorders (such as MS). The Kemper lab is currently focusing on three key questions:

What is the composition of the Complosome in different cells?

What are the functions of the Complosome?

How is the Complosome regulated?

They utilize immune/tissue cells from healthy donors, from patients with complement deficiencies, from patients with immune cell-driven infectious, autoimmune disease or cancer and from patients with deviations in novel ‘complosome’-regulated pathways for gene and scRNA arrays, epigenetic landscape evaluation, and (spatial) proteomic and metabolomic assessments.

Register at Eventbrite 

Join via Zoom: https://cardiff.zoom.us/j/89260638181?pwd=ZlhFc281WVhiaFhKTkVBK3M3WCt0UT09, Meeting ID: 892 6063 8181, Password: 225149