Thomas Korn

Thomas Korn graduated from Medical School at the Julius-Maximilians University Würzburg and the Royal London School of Medicine, afterwards, he started a residency program in Neurology and worked in the Neuroimmunology Research groups of Klaus Toyka, Würzburg and later with Stefan Jung, Homburg/Saar. He became board approved Fellow in Neurology in 2005 and then began a postdoctoral training with Vijay Kuchroo at Harvard Medical School. Back in Germany, he became senior physician at the Department of Neurology of the Technical University of Munich and started his own research group with a Heisenberg Award from the German Research Council. Since 2013, Professor Korn has held a full professorship for Neuroimmunology and has been deputy director of the Department of Neurology of the Klinikum rechts der Isar. He is interested in the molecular characterization of fate decisions of T cells in non-lymphoid tissues in particular in the central nervous system in the context of autoimmunity. A specific focus of his research is the formation of CD4+ T helper cell responses.

Read more here: https://kornlab.med.tum.de/

PRESENTATION SUMMARY

T cell responses in CNS autoimmunity

In multiple sclerosis, a paradigmatic T cell-mediated autoimmune disease of the central nervous system (CNS), autoreactive T cells become activated in the systemic immune compartment, infiltrate the CNS, are reactivated and finally invade the CNS parenchyma to orchestrate inflammatory demyelination and axonal damage. Multidimensional single cell-analyses of T cells have fueled the debate about either extensive plasticity or "mixed" priming of T helper cell subsets in vivo. We developed an experimental framework to probe the idea that the site of priming in the systemic immune compartment is a determinant of T helper cell-induced immunopathology in remote organs. By site-specific in vivo labeling of antigen-specific T cells in inguinal (i) or gut draining mesenteric (m) lymph nodes, we show that i-T cells and m-T cells isolated from the inflamed CNS in a model of multiple sclerosis are distinct. We propose that the definition of T helper cell subsets by their site of priming might guide an advanced understanding of T helper cell biology in health and disease.