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Simone Joosten
My main interest is to understand the human immune system in health and disease. Over the last decade I have been working on host immunity towards tuberculosis (TB). TB biomarkers are one of the key subjects I have been working on, including bioprofiling of clinical samples. In addition, I have been investigating human CD8+ T-cells in the response towards Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb). We have identified CD8+ regulatory T-cell subsets and characterized these. More recently, we have focussed on non-classically restricted human CD8+ T-cells and identified a large array of Mtb epitopes that can be presented by human HLA-E and is recognized by human CD8+ T-cells. Surprisingly, these cells controlled Mtb outgrowth within macrophages but also produced Th2 cytokines and were capable of activating B-cells directly. Over the last couple of years we have been investigating the functional role of B cells in combatting Mtb, and discovered unexpected functional impairments during active TB disease.