Eliane Piaggio - IL-2-based therapies for the treatment of autoimmunity and cancer

Interleukine-2 (IL-2) is a cytokine with both immune stimulating and suppressive function. Consequently, it has been used in the clinic at high doses to stimulate the immune response against cancer and more recently it is being evaluated at low doses to block the immune response in conditions of undesired immune activation, such as autoimmunity or during GVHD. However, IL-2 can be toxic, and depending on the desired effect, IL-2 action needs to be re-directed to effector or to regulatory immune cells. This can be obtained by engineering IL-2 muteins, by generating IL-2/anti-IL-2 antibody complexes or by combining IL-2 with different drugs depending on the underlying pathology.

Eliane Piaggio - INSERM Unit 932: "Immunity and Cancer", at the Institut Curie

Dr. E. Piaggio is a research director of the INSERM. She directs the "Translational Immunotherapy team” at the INSERM Unit 932: "Immunity and Cancer", at the Institut Curie, in Paris. Her career has been focused on immunotherapy of infectious diseases (Chagas' disease), autoimmunity (mainly type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis/EAE), allorectivity (GVHD and transplantation) and more recently, in cancer. Her team is interested the use of low-dose IL-2 to stimulate Tregs and the use of IL-2/anti-IL-2 antibody complexes as immunomodulators.