Alternative to ghostlab3/17/2023 This medley of personalities and projects ensured that no lab meeting, or coffee break, ever contained a dull moment. The postdocs were encouraged to follow their own paths, even if not directly testing the Danger Model, but always with the invaluable intellectual feedback from Polly. She populated the Ghost Lab with postdocs having broad interests and backgrounds, and such diversity was manifested by the different areas of research and models that were being studied at any particular time in the lab (oral tolerance, parasitic infection, DC activation, transplant tolerance, tumor rejection, newborn immunization, gut homeostasis, just to name a few). Professional antigen presenting cells (Macrophages or DC) are activated to stimulate T cells by endogenous cellular alarm signals released from distressed or damaged cells. Those that are packaged with something that causes damage, and those that mimicĭanger Model. Initiate allergy by the direct damage of dendritic or other cells, and she furtherĮxpanded by defining three categories of allergens: those that themselves cause damage, Polly proposed that toxic chemicals and allergenic proteases might Model may be an illuminating alternative for studying allergic contactĭermatitis”. RegardingĪllergy, McFadden and Basketter appreciated that the “recently proposed danger Her model brought a new perspective able to explain numerous immune phenomena. 6 Her most revolutionary work, developed in discussions withĮphraim Fuchs, is the set of essays postulating the Danger Model of Immunology where, inĭramatic contrast to the established dogma, she proposed that damage,Īnd not the non-self nature of an antigen, is what triggers an immune Naïve or previously activated, respectively. Tolerance or activation of CD4 T cells, depending on whether the CD4 T cells were Her work on the role of B cells as APCs, further showing that they can induce either Nine months it remained unoccupied while Polly immersed herself in chaos theory,Įxploring its capacity to predict the immune response. Tolerance and Memory, best known as the Ghost Lab, a name given to the lab during the For the following 24 years Polly headed the Section of Immunological In 1989, she was recruited as a “special investigator” by Ronald SchwartzĪt the Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Immunology (LCMI) ( Figure 1B), at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, 5 With all of these accomplishments early in her career, Polly was already a legend in immunology. DCs and macrophages) that can activate naïve CD4 T cells, and showed that B cells are semi-professionals, since they can activate memory but not naïve T cells. It was at the BII that she first coined the term “professional” antigen presenting cell to describe APCs (i.e. In this creative and collaborative environment, where each member was assigned a small budget and a technician, she authored six publications in six years, three of them in Nature. In 1983, she joined the Basel Institute of Immunology (BII), Basel, Switzerland. Three years later Polly joined the laboratory of Herman Waldmann at the University of Cambridge, England, where she demonstrated, for the first time, that T-cell tolerance was MHC-restricted. Polly’s thesis work provided the model of alloreactivity that we still quote today, 4 and with Mike Bevan she described cross priming. At this time, San Diego also had a collection of other immunological royalty, including Mel Cohn, Mike Bevan, Susan Swain, John Kappler, Pippa Marrack, and Rolf Zinkernagel, among others. In 1976 she joined the laboratory of Dick Dutton at the University of California in San Diego to do a PhD in Immunology. In her late twenties, while working as a bartender in Davis, California, her intellect was noticed by a local professor who persuaded her to take up science. New York, California, Colorado) Polly graduated from the University of California, Irvine. The daughter of a WWII Dutch resistance fighter and holocaust survivor and a French ex-nun, Polly Celine Eveline Matzinger migrated to the USA with her family in 1954, when she was seven years old, under a French quota, though the family was living in Holland at the time. 3 Polly is both a theoretician who challenges existing dogma to shape future discoveries and an experimentalist who succeeded in deepening our understanding of how the immune system “works”. IgG 1, IgG 4, IgE, IgA, Th1, 2, 3 CTL, etc). 1, 2 Second, if it reacts, how does it determine the type of immune response it will choose (e.g. First, how does the immune system know whether to react or not against a given molecule. Polly Matzinger’s work has mainly been focused on two fundamental questions in immunology and therefore also relevant to allergy.
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