Klaas Van Gisbergen

Klaas van Gisbergen currently heads the laboratory of Adaptive Immunity at Sanquin Research in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where he aims to understand how memory CD8 T-cells provide protection against secondary infection with pathogens and how they counter tumor growth. The ultimate aim is to exploit this knowledge for the development of strategies that employ CD8 T-cells in vaccination or immunotherapy. Important unresolved challenges regarding memory CD8 T-cells include how they develop and how they are re-activated to effectively combat viruses and tumor cells, while minimizing collateral immunopathology to healthy tissues. The current research of the van Gisbergen lab focuses on these central questions regarding memory CD8 T-cells. He has discovered and characterized a transcription factor that was named Hobit for Homologue of Blimp-1 in T-cells (van Gisbergen et al., Nat Imm, 2012). More recently, he and his co-workers found that Hobit together with the related transcription factor Blimp-1 acts as a transcriptional ‘master’ regulator of tissue residency in CD8 T-cells, NKT cells and ILC1 through the suppression of receptors that mediate tissue exit (Mackay et al., Science, 2016). Importantly, his work on Hobit has been instrumental to define tissue-resident memory T cells (Trm) as a separate lineage of memory CD8 T-cells. Exploiting the Trm-restricted expression pattern of Hobit, his lab has constructed Hobit reporter/deleter mice to specifically visualize and manipulate Trm. This newly developed tool has been instrumental to establish how Trm develop in primary responses (Parga-Vidal et al., Sci Imm, 2021), how Trm contribute to secondary immune responses against re-encountered intracellular pathogens (Behr et al., Nat Imm, 2020) and how resident lymphocytes known as ILC1 develop into effectors (Friedrich et al., Nat Imm, 2021).