2.5 millions of euros to decipher the human immune response: to Federica Sallusto the ERC Advanced Grant

 Press release
21.02.2013

Dr. Federica Sallusto was awarded the prestigious ERC Advanced Grant from the European Research Council for the project entitled “PREDICT: Dissecting the human T cell response to pathogens, allergens, and self-antigens”. The 2.5 million Euro grant honors Dr. Sallusto’s scientific achievements and ground-breaking contributions in the field of T cell immunology. Dr. Sallusto is Head of the Cellular Immunology Laboratory at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB), which is affiliated to the Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI).

Dr. Sallusto’s research focuses on T lymphocytes, a cell type that is a key player in the immune system, controlling essentially all aspects of immune responses. The PREDICT project aims at deciphering the T cell response that protects the host from infection by viruses, bacteria or fungi, but also that causes pathology when reacting against environmental antigens, such as in allergy, or self-antigens, such as in autoimmunity. The originality of the project resides in using a powerful high-throughput T cell library method developed in her lab for a global analysis of the human T cell repertoire, which is shaped as a consequence of the complexity of microbial and cellular signals as well as of environmental and genetic factors. The project is expected to provide answers to fundamental questions related to tolerance versus autoimmunity and new knowledge to design improved vaccines and therapeutic strategies. It aims also to define new clinical parameters related to disease state and severity, which are of primordial importance for diagnosis and therapeutic approaches of a disease.

The ERC Advanced Grants are intended for European researchers who have made outstanding contributions in their fields of research, and are assigned to enable them to take on projects particularly challenging and highly innovative

In the last call, the ERC received 2’304 applications from 24 European and European Associated countries.  Only 302 applications received funding (26 from Switzerland); of these a minority (15%) were given to women researchers. Thus, the ERC Advanced grant crowns Dr. Sallusto’s outstanding career: her research already resulted in major discoveries of important medical implication and is attested by an impressive track record, major prizes and memberships.

PREDICT is the second ERC Advanced grant awarded to the IRB after IMMUNExplore obtained by Prof. Lanzavecchia in 2009.