Systems Serology Core

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CORE 1 – SYSTEMS SEROLOGY CORE – ABSTRACT Accumulating data points to dramatic immunologic changes during pregnancy and early life. However, how these immune perturbations alter the immune response to vaccination or to infection have yet to be fully defined. Under Core 1, in depth comprehensive characterization will be performed on the humoral immune response to improve our understanding of the mechanisms by which the immune system changes throughout pregnancy, how these changes affect responses to vaccines and how infants benefit from maternal immunity and in turn respond to vaccines. Specifically, Core 1 will exploit and evolve Systems Serology to broadly and deeply probe the nature of the humoral immune response in a sample sparing manner, via the development of multiplexed-antibody profiling approaches. Additionally Core 1 will develop lower-throughput functional assays to probe the interaction between antibodies and host-innate immune cells, in a fully autologous fashion, to define the overall impact of altered antibody and cellular state in pregnancy and early life. Thus Core 1 will deeply interrogate and define changes in humoral immunity throughout pregnancy, at birth, and throughout early infant life. The Core leader will provide all the expertise, infrastructure, reagents, personnel, and training, to ensure the efficient and successful analysis and deployment of this technology under Projects 1 & 2, as well as support in generating data for Projects 2 & 4. Thus the main role of this Core is to provide the leadership and the technical expertise to ensure that antibody assays are run in a standard fashion, that novel technologies evolve from this Core to support the needs of the overall Consortium, and that the Consortium is kept abreast of the latest developments in assessing antibody responses.