Cynthia Louis The Melbourne Immunotherapy Network Winter Symposium 2019

Cynthia Louis

Dr Cynthia Louis is an early career postdoctoral scientist with interest in the immunology and identification of novel therapeutic targets in autoimmune diseases. She completed her PhD degree in mid-2016 at University of Melbourne and undertake her first postdoctoral research training with Professor Ian Wicks in WEHI. With her expertise in a wide-range of autoimmune disease models (experimental arthritis and multiple sclerosis models), she has participated in projects with potential therapeutic applications. Her first postdoctoral research work published in Arthritis & Rheumatology in therapeutically inhibiting autoimmune germinal center reaction has resulted in partnership with industry collaborators. In the short period of her postdoctoral training, she has also acquired extensive scientific (disease models, novel mouse strains, immunological assays) and clinical (biobanked biospecimens from the Rheumatology Unit of the Royal Melbourne Hospital) resources to support her research, and established alliances with internal and external collaborators. In this 2019 MIN Winter Retreat, she will be presenting two major findings from her recent collaboration with Dr Fernando Guimaraes and Professor Nick Huntington: (1) tissue NK cells may amplify joint inflammation in arthritis via GM-CSF production and thus represent a novel target in immune complex-mediated pathology, and (2) the SOCS family member CIS is a direct, stimulus-induced negative regulator of GM-CSF receptor (GM-CSFR) signaling in myeloid cells during inflammation. These data support the idea of novel therapeutic strategies, such as CIS mimetics, to boost intracellular stores of CIS in inflammatory cells and suppress GM-CSF-driven inflammation. Inhibition of CIS as a cancer treatment would presumably also increase GM-CSF signaling in myeloid cells and potentially skew tumor-resident myeloid/dendritic cell development and differentiation, which may impact on tumor antigen presentation and myeloid-derived suppressor cell (MDSC) differentiation.