FOCIS 2022 conference (San Francisco) Outcome report

The FOCIS (Federation of Clinical Immunology Societies) meeting focused on translational immunology with participants ranging from molecular biologist to clinicians. It was the perfect place for crossdisciplinary exchanges of ideas to apply our new developmental biology knowledge of maternal cells to their human medical implications and I am grateful to the JSDB in supporting my participation to this meeting.

At the conference, I presented by oral and poster presentations the findings of my recently completed doctoral studies. Our research focused on revealing the nature and roles of maternal cells in pups, and we observed a potential role of maternal cells to prevent adverse immune reactivity in the neonates. On the other hand, potential human clinical involvement of maternal chimerism have been indicated by the research led by Dr. Toshihiro Muraji on the incidence of maternal cells in the congenital disorder biliary atresia. Further translational research is needed to bridge this developmental biology knowledge of maternal cells and their clinical consequences.

At FOCIS, my presentations caught the interest of both medical doctors and scientists lead of medical database repositories, curious of the detectability of maternal cells in publicly available single cells datasets, opening the door to potential interdisciplinary collaborations.

In terms of career development, I had the opportunity to meet professors looking for postdoctoral fellows, and received an offer to join NYU Langone Health where I will be working from next January.

Finally, attending the pre-meeting courses and targeted workshops was very valuable for learning more about the proper methods and pipelines to analyze the immunophenotyping data I collected. In particular, the tools I was introduced to to combine CyTOF data from different batches were directly applied to the data in the paper we will be submitting to an international journal this month.