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2nd Meeting of the 202nd Session (2022-2023)
Dr Georgia Perona-Wright
On Monday 31st October 2022, at 7pm
From a virus' perspective, success is replication and spread. For the human hosts, our priority is not to die. The immune system is our principal defence system: keeping the virus out, limiting its invasion if it gets in, and stimulating repair of the damage it causes during its visit. But these strengths come at a cost, and the immune system itself can cause fatal collateral damage as it focuses on eradicating its viral targets. In this talk, we will discuss how the immune system tackles respiratory viruses, the risks and challenges of that interaction, and how we design vaccines to prevent both lung damage and viral spread.
Georgia Perona-Wright is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Infection & Immunity at the University of Glasgow. Her research looks at how immune responses balance the need for immune protection and the risk of immune-mediated pathology. She uses a number of infections and co-infections, including parasitic, bacterial and viral pathogens, and her work covers involve T cell biology, cytokine signalling and metabolic regulation. She moved to Glasgow from Vancouver, Canada, and has run research programmes in Scotland, the US and Canada. She holds funding from the Medical Research Council, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, and the Carnegie Trust; and has industrial PhD partnerships with AstraZeneca and Sitryx. She is an editorial board member for Discovery Immunology, and is active in public engagement and outreach, especially during the Covid19 pandemic: https://cvr-engagement.co.uk/vaccine-questions-answered.