Why allergies start in the skin

Professor Franca Ronchese, Programme Leader, Malaghan Institute of Medical Research, Wellington, New Zealand

Allergies are damaging immune responses to otherwise innocuous agents such as pollens or certain foods. Despite allergic diseases increasing in prevalence, we do not have a full understanding of how they start and how immune cells first interact with allergens.

We used transcriptomic technologies and in vivo cell depletion models to characterize the cell populations that take up allergens in skin. We found that, unlike lung and small intestine, the immune environment of the skin is innately conditioned to induce allergic immune responses. In this talk, I will discuss the cells and mediators that drive the pro-allergic environment in skin and present evidence of their impact on the resulting immune response.

Franca trained at the University of Padova, Italy, and then as a Postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Ron Germain at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, USA. She then joined the Basel Institute for Immunology in Basel, Switzerland, where she became interested in antigen presentation by dendritic cells in vivo. Since 1994 Franca has been leading the Immune Cell Biology group at the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research in Wellington, New Zealand. Her current work employs cellular and molecular technologies to examine dendritic cell diversity during the initiation of CD4+ helper T cell responses, with a particular focus on allergic immunity.