Description:

The Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering presents:

12th Annual Richard S.H. Mah Lectures – Featured Speaker: Dr. Arup Chakraborty

Robert T. Haslam Professor of Chemical Engineering, MIT

October 20th, 2016

Frances Searle 1441
2240 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL 60208

8:45 AM – Refreshments
9:00 AM – Seminar, Hitting HIV Where It Hurts with T Cells

Abstract
Some pathogens have evolved which have defied successful vaccination using the empirical paradigms pioneered by Pasteur and Jenner. I will describe how bringing together approaches from physics, engineering, and basic/clinical immunology is beginning to confront the challenge of designing vaccines that can combat these scourges. One characteristic of many pathogens for which successful vaccines do not exist is that they present themselves in various guises. HIV is a prominent example because of its high mutability. This highly mutable virus can evade natural or vaccine induced immune responses, often by mutating at multiple sites linked by compensatory interactions. If one wishes to define the mutational vulnerabilities of HIV, these collective compensatory pathways need to be identified so as to not target the involved sites by a vaccine-induced immune response. Moreover, the combinations of mutations that the virus cannot make and still maintain viability need to be determined, so as to target the pertinent sites. Thus, knowledge of the fitness landscape of HIV – fitness as a function of sequence with explicit account of coupling between mutations – is an important ingredient for rational design of vaccines that can confront this scourge. I will describe how we developed models to translate data on HIV protein sequences to knowledge of the HIV fitness landscape using approaches rooted in spin glass physics, variational calculations and evolutionary simulations. Based on these results, and clinical and experimental tests, a therapeutic T cell-based vaccine was designed, which is now being advanced to pre-clinical studies in monkeys.

Bio
Arup K. Chakraborty is the Robert T. Haslam Professor of Chemical Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, and Biological Engineering at MIT. He is the founding Director of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science. He is also a founding steering committee member of the Ragon Institute of MIT, MGH, and Harvard, and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard. After obtaining his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (Kanpur), PhD in chemical engineering at the University of Delaware, and postdoctoral studies at the University of Minnesota, he joined the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in December 1988. He rose through the ranks, and ultimately served as the Warren and Katherine Schlinger Distinguished Professor and Chair of Chemical Engineering, Professor of Chemistry, and Professor of Biophysics at Berkeley. He was also Head of Theoretical and Computational Biology at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In September 2005, Chakraborty moved to MIT. His entire career has been focused on research at the intersection of disciplines. After an early career in engineering of polymers and catalysts, since 2000, Chakraborty’s work has focused on bringing together immunology and statistical physics. Chakraborty's predictive computational/theoretical work has impacted both experimental basic immunology and infectious disease research. He has especially contributed to our understanding of T cell signaling, T cell development and pathogen specificity, the immunological vulnerabilities of HIV and rational vaccine design. Chakraborty’s work has been recognized by numerous honors, including the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, the E.O. Lawrence Medal for Life Sciences from the US DOE, the Allan P. Colburn and Professional Progress awards from the AIChE, a Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award, and a National Young investigator award. Chakraborty was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering for different bodies of work. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and serves on the US Defense Science Board. Chakraborty has received four teaching awards at Berkeley and MIT.