Dr Elma Tchilian

Elma joined Pirbright in January 2014 as group leader of Swine Influenza Immunology and is now head of Mucosal Immunology. She obtained her PhD at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund before working as a postdoctoral fellow in Birmingham, Senior Research Scientist at the Edward Jenner Institute and Principal Investigator at Oxford University. Elma identified the leucocyte common antigen (CD45) as a cause of severe combined immunodeficiency in man and the role of CD45 variants in disease. In Oxford she demonstrated the importance of local immunity in vaccine induced protection against tuberculosis.

The specific goals of Elma’s group are:

• To improve immunisation strategies for inducing long-lived high affinity broadly neutralising B cell memory in swine.
• To test prophylactic and therapeutic monoclonal antibodies and to uncover mechanisms underlying their protective efficacy.
• To determine the importance of local T cell immunity, including lung tissue resident memory cells, in respiratory infections and develop improved strategies to induce local immunity.
• To understand transmission dynamics of swine influenza, determine correlates of transmission and means of preventing transmission.

Elma’s lab has developed many tools to study immunity in pigs, including cell transfer, peptide-SLA tetramers (in collaboration with Andy Sewell, Cardiff University) and means of enumerating tissue resident memory cells. They have established a reproducible one-to-one transmission model for swine influenza and shown that aerosol delivery is the most efficient way to induce heterosubtypic immunity against swine influenza. They have begun to investigate antibody function and specificity in the pig influenza model and have successfully demonstrated its value in testing the protective efficacy of human antibodies.