Nina Le Bert, PhD

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Senior Research Fellow in Professor Antonio Bertoletti’s laboratory at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore

Nina Le Bert investigates human immunology with a specific interest in the role of antigen-specific T and B cells in control and pathogenesis of viral infections.

She is a Senior Research Fellow in Professor Antonio Bertoletti’s laboratory at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, specialized in the field of viral hepatitis and T cells. Here, she studies the role of antigen-specific T and B cells in control of chronic HBV infection. First, she established that HBV-specific T cells associate with viral control upon therapy discontinuation in chronic HBV patients. This study demonstrated that the measurement of HBV-specific T cells has the potential to serve as an immunological biomarker for the stratification of chronically infected patients and could guide treatment decisions. Then, together with a PhD student under her supervision, she demonstrated that HBsAg-specific B cells are dysfunctional in chronic HBV infection but are amenable to a partial rescue by B cell–maturing cytokines and PD-1 blockade. Subsequently, she showed that rather the duration than the quantity of HBsAg associates with deletion and exhaustion of HBsAg-specific T cells in chronic HBV patients. HBsAg-specific T cells are only present in the early stages of chronic HBV infection and nearly undetectable in patients above 35 years old, suggesting that novel therapies aimed at inhibiting HBsAg production might show more efficacy in younger patients. More recently, she is leading the immune profiling of HBV-HCC patients pre- and post-immunotherapy with TCR-redirected T cells in the laboratory, to establish early immunological correlates with therapy efficacy.

 

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