Pierre Milpied - Class-switched memory B cells remodel BCRs within secondary germinal centers

High affinity antibody responses to pathogens and vaccines require affinity maturation of antigen-specific B cells in germinal centers (GC). In GCs, B cells coordinate diverse functional programs which must be carefully orchestrated to ensure B cell receptor (BCR) diversification and selection, while avoiding off-target mutational activity and lymphomagenesis. In my talk, I will show how we have used integrative single-cell analyses of gene expression, phenotype and BCR sequence, to decode the dynamics of GC B cell affinity maturation and its deregulation in B cell lymphomas.

Pierre Milpied - Centre d’Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy

After a multidisciplinary engineer’s degree at Ecole Polytechnique and a M.Sc. in Cancer Science at Institut Gustave Roussy, I trained as a PhD student in the lab of Pr Olivier Hermine (Necker Hospital, now Institut Imagine, Paris), working on mouse and human T cell subsets. Then I moved to The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, USA, to work on B cell immunity as a postdoctoral scientist in the lab of Pr Michael McHeyzer-Williams. There, I co-developed an integrative single-cell analysis approach in mouse models of antigen-specific B cell responses. I grew a deep interest in the use of high throughput single-cell data for modeling differentiation processes in B cell biology. In 2014, I joined the Centre d’Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy (CIML) in the team of Dr Bertrand Nadel, and was appointed Inserm junior scientist in 2017. Since then, I have been leading projects focusing on B cell immunity and B cell lymphomas with single-cell genomics, at the crossroads of immunology, cancer science, and bioinformatics.