CAMaDでは、次世代のワクチン開発や感染症学・免疫学研究をリードする若手研究者の育成を重要なミッションの一つに掲げており、これらの分野において研究を行う若手研究者を対象に、海外での研究活動に参画するための支援を行っています。今回は令和６年度の採択者を順番に紹介いたします。

学 会 名： 7th European Congress of Immunology (ECI)
開 催 地： The Convention Centre Dublin（アイルランド・ダブリン）
渡航期間： 2024年8月30日～2024年9月6日（8日間）

Lab of molecular Immunology
Specially appointed researcher
Xiuyuan Lu

Thanks to the “Overseas Dispatch Support Program for Young Researchers provided” by CAMaD,
I could participate in the 7th European Congress of Immunology (ECI) held by the European Federation
of Immunological Societies (EFIS) on September 1-4, 2024. Most of the participants of this conference
were from Europe, and there were also some presenters from all over the world. The topics of the
congress covered almost every aspect related to immunology. Besides the keynote speeches that
were expected to be attended by all participants, there were always two or three major symposiums
given by senior researchers ongoing, and the workshops in which the young researchers gave talks
were parallelly held at the same time as the major symposiums. The themes of the sections were well
organized, to make sure that the symposiums and workshops with similar topics would not be held at
the same time. There were two plenaries with four speakers, three keynotes, 30 symposiums, and 74
workshops besides morning and noon seminars during the 4 days, so the schedule was quite tight.
Poster sessions were arranged in the last 3 days of the congress, and almost 1200 posters categorized
into 49 topics were presented.

Besides a symposium entitled “Future immunotherapy and vaccine approaches”, oral presentations
related to vaccines were separated into workshops “Cancer vaccines”, “Vaccines for bacterial
diseases”,and “Vaccines for viral infections”, and each of them contains around six presentations.
From the volume of topics, we can see that there are many researches related to vaccine development
in Europe.

Poster topics related to vaccines included “Cancer vaccines”, “Vaccines” and “Vaccines for
immunotherapy”. Besides the many posters under the “Vaccines” topic, numerous presentations under
other topics were related to vaccines. On Sep. 4th, I gave a poster presentation under the “Vaccines”
topic to introduce our recent work. My title was “Clonotypic analysis of T cell responses reveals
long-term vaccine efficacy“. Aside from my own study, I could not see other researches on T cell
response induced by vaccines, which may imply that the roles of T cells in vaccine-mediated protection
are underestimated by the researchers.

One project that I thought was very interesting was about the artificial design of live-attenuated
vaccines. The presentation was given by Volker Thiel from Switzerland. They used a strategy called
“One-to-stop (OTS) codon strategy”, in which the codon UCC (Ser) was changed to UCA (Ser),
while the encoded amino acid would not be changed in translation, but the latter codon has a chance to
mutate naturally to stop codons UGA/UAA in the replication, and lead to the translation of
a dysfunctional protein. The modified microbe had a higher likelihood of obtaining stop codons
dependent on polymerase error, and had fewer chances to produce a viable descendant. In addition,
the level of attenuation can be adjusted by the number of modified codons, which would be useful for
pathogens with different infection efficiency and toxicity.

Another thing that impressed me was that there were not only academic presentations, but also talks
on the topics of researchers, research environment and culture. There was a symposium entitled
“The future of leadership in academia / challenges for leadership in academia”, in which two presenters
shared their opinions on the healthy research environment, practical suggestions for group leaders,
and the benefits and challenges of diverse teams. I found their suggestions very helpful, such as tips
for agendas of meetings and “mood is important in cooperation”. Although I am not a group leader,
we all need to cooperate with other people during the work. And I was not alone, as a comment from
the audience said that this kind of lecture should be arranged as keynotes so most attendees can have
a chance to hear it.

After hearing the presentations in workshops, I felt that the young researchers in Europe were very
used to giving talks in front of an audience, although sometimes their projects were quite simple.
I think Japanese students should be given more chances to present their work, so that they can be
more prepared when communicating with potential collaborators.

Overall, the 7th European Congress of Immunology was an academic conference with high quality and
I learned many things on and beyond the research. At the conference, there were joint symposiums of
EFIS and other societies such as EULAR, IUIS, AAI, EAACI and CSI. I wish in the future JSI could have
more collaboration with the EFIS and send more students there for communication.