School of Medicine

Central Biotechnology Services (CBS) is proud to have sponsored the recent Summer School of the British Society for Immunology held at St Donat's Castle on 5-8 July 2011 (with support by the School of Medicine and the i3-IRG). The overall aim of the Summer School was to facilitate an understanding of the fundamentals of the immune system. Topics were divided into themes of 'Killing Bugs', 'Killing Self', and 'Killing Tumours', enabling the participants to leave the Summer School with a broad knowledge of what the immune system can do. 

CBS sponsored the Poster Prize, donating an Apple iPad 2 as the prize for the best poster presentation. The winning poster was judged by a panel of Immunologists, and was awarded to Clare Grant from the Oxford Vaccine Group at Churchill Hospital (Oxford). Here presentation, entitled “Efferent lymphatic cannulation: A novel technique to monitor antigen-specific B cell responses” outlined Foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) vaccines inducing a short duration of protective immunity; thought to be due to the largely T-independent nature of the antigen1. Little is understood about the kinetics of the FMDV-specific plasma and memory B-cell responses post vaccination. Her findings suggested that efferent lymph can be used to provide a rich source of antigen-specific plasma cells that can be used to monitor the maturation of the antigen-specific B cell response through deep-sequence analysis.