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Bacher Petra - VIB Conferences

Petra Bacher

Kiel University (CAU), DE
Biography

Petra Bacher holds an assistant professorship for Immunology and Immunogenetics at Kiel University (CAU), Germany. She received her PhD in Immunology from the University Jena in 2014. The Bacher lab has a strong background in human antigen-specific CD4+ T cell analyses and aims at understanding the failure of tolerance mechanisms in the human immune system during chronic inflammatory diseases. Therein, we specifically investigate the role of CD4+ T cells in immune-mediated diseases using novel direct analyses of antigen-specific T cells. Our recent work demonstrated that TCR cross-reactivity plays an important role in modulating human T-cell responses, including induction of pathogenic Th17 cells by the intestinal microbiota and modulation of the response to newly encountered antigens, which particularly affects the elderly. We also made several contributions to understanding T cell responses in infectious diseases and T cell-based diagnostics and recently analyzed the role of SARS-CoV-2 reactive T cells and preexisting immunity in COVID-19 disease.