Alina Steinbach
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Wissenschaftlicher Lebenslauf
| Feb 2017 - July 2017 | Postdoctoral scientist, Junior Research Group Immunotherapy and Immunoprevention, DKFZ, Heidelberg |
| 2016 | Nicola Werner Award for an excellent PhD thesis |
| 2013 - 2017 | PhD student, Junior Research Group Immunotherapy and Immunoprevention, DKFZ, Heidelberg |
| 2010 - 2012 | MSc Molecular Biosciences, Major Molecular and Cellular Biology, Ruprecht-Karls-University, Heidelberg |
| 2007 - 2010 | BSc Biology, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-University, Bonn |
Forschungsprojekt
HPV-induced changes in antigen processing and MHC-I epitope presentation
The clearance of HPV infection requires an effective T cell mediated immune response. Therefore, several approaches to develop a therapeutic vaccine have focused on HPV-derived T cell epitopes. However, these approaches so far had limited clinical success. This is caused by the fact that HPV employs numerous immune evasion mechanisms, among which MHC-I downregulation and repression of components of the antigen-processing machinery (APM) directly interfere with T cell recognition of infected or already transformed host cells.
The goal of this project was to analyze the expression of APM components systematically in a large collection of cell lines naturally transformed by HPV16. In addition, the impact of the inflammatory cytokine IFN-γ, which is enhancing antigen processing and presentation, was examined. The only consistent change of an APM component was upregulation of the ER-associated aminopeptidase ERAP1. Its upregulation reduced surface presentation of some HPV epitopes, and may thus represent a novel HPV immune evasion mechanism.