Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "Unraveling of protective innate and adaptive immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 in the setting of HCoV crossreactivity" "Piet Maes" "Laboratory of Clinical and Epidemiological Virology (Rega Institute), Therapeutic and Diagnostic Antibodies, Digestive Oncology" "A thorough understanding of the immune response against SARS-CoV-2 is crucial for effective epidemiological, immunotherapeutic and immunoprophylactic COVID-19 management. In this project, we first focus on a comprehensive mapping of epitope and neutralizing antibody profiles with different COVID-19 disease severity. Since antibodies may also have a cross-reactive origin resulting from previous HCoV infections, this study will include complete cross-reactivity mapping. The multi-epitope reactivity patterns will be correlated with disease and exposure severity. In the next step, we will perform a further biological profiling of interesting patterns related to disease severity and/or in vitro protective features by including in-depth immunological characterization of the B and T cell responses, antibody CDR (complementarity-determining region) profiling, B cell receptor sequencing and T cell response profiling and T cell receptor sequencing. This outcome is critical for development of reliable serology and seroprevalence tests, for vaccine selection and evaluation, and for our understanding of the immunopathogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 infection." "Scrutinizing the role of mast cells during human and murine Leishmania infections" "Jurgen Vercauteren, Cathy Matheï" "Laboratory of Clinical and Epidemiological Virology (Rega Institute), Academic Center for General Practice, Universiteit Antwerpen" "Despite a global distribution of Leishmaniasis and 1.5 to 2 million new cases annually, no effective human vaccines are available and treatment failure with current drugs is on the rise. Mast cells (MCs) are immune sentinels in the skin that are amongst the first to contact the Leishmania parasite following a sand fly bite. These cells play major roles in orchestrating early inflammatory responses, regulating vascular permeability and influencing immunity development in lymph nodes. Despite seminal work in mosquito-transmitted viral diseases, MCs remain underexplored as target cell during parasitic infections. Combining the strengths in immunology, parasitology, transcriptomics and biostatistics, the role of MCs will be assessed in natural Leishmania infection. Combining digital transcriptomic data from large human cohorts and experimental mouse infections, will enable detailed cross-species and multi-tissue insights into MC responses across the whole clinical spectrum of leishmaniasis. Using human MCs derived from progenitors in donor blood, a battery of cellular activation markers and specific silencing of MC gene expression using an in-house, cutting-edge method will enable unprecedented mechanistic insights in the interaction with infectious agents, i.e. Leishmania spp. parasites. This may provide new biomarkers for clinical follow-up as well as novel therapeutic targets that will be explored in the appropriate animal models of leishmaniasis initiated by a sand fly bite."