Translational Research Symposium Speaker Spotlight: Doctor Joshua Ooi

Dr Joshua Ooi

Monash University's 5th annual Translational Research Symposium is being hosted by its three metropolitan clinical schools on 21 June 2019. The symposium will host a diverse group of medical researchers presenting their work into translational research. RSVP here.

Doctor Joshua Ooi is a senior research fellow in the Centre of Inflammatory Diseases at Monash Health.
Dr. Ooi is an Al and Val Rosentrauss Fellow at the School of Cinical Sciences, Monash University. During his PhD and post-doctoral years, he mapped the key pathogenic autoepitopes in two autoimmune diseases. More recently, he demonstrated that the key determinant of autoimmune disease risk is the numbers of autoepitope specific Tregs (Nature, 2017). Dr. Ooi's work, which is funded by the NHMRC, the Rebecca Cooper Medical Research Foundation and the Lupus Research Alliance, now focuses on developing methods that increase the frequencies of autoepitope specific Tregs.

Doctor Ooi's presentation abstract can be found below:
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Antigen specific regulatory T cells to treat autoimmune diseases

One of the key drivers of autoimmune disease is the imbalance between autoantigen specific pro-inflammatory T helper cells and anti-inflammatory autoantigen specific T regulatory cells (Tregs). The advent of highly sensitive immunological tools, such as tetramers and single cell sequencing, now allows for the identification of antigen specific TCRs that can be then be transduced onto Tregs. Thus, the use of adoptively transferred Tregs as an antigen specific cell based therapy is soon becoming a reality.
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We look forward to welcoming Dr Ooi for the Symposium!

More information:
Translational Research Symposium

• Date: Friday 21 June 2019
• Time: 8:30 for 9:00am start - 5:30pm close
• RSVP here

Find out more about the symposium and our speaker program.

If you are a graduate student or early career researcher, you may be interested in the Young Investigator poster competition. See here for more details and to RSVP.